This is exactly what I did. I replaced it with a Immich, a webdav client, and an xmpp server (prosody). I only needed online storage for phone photo access/backup and syncing my keepass DB and contacts. I set these apps up once and now I don't need to touch them.

Nextcloud is great but too often it's compared to Google Drive instead of Google Workspace (as seen here). If all you need is cloud storage, use Owncloud (Nextcloud upstream) or any of a thousand similar tools (I use Cloudreve). If you need a full office suite, use Nextcloud.

Or Syncthing, if you don't need virtual folders or selective sync it's so quick and lightweight.

The problem is not php-fpm, the problem is when people who perform as SysAdmin dont know how to tweak it properly.

I deploy Nextcloud instances for production environments. :/

Yep, though I have a bug in my use case from a older version, and I still didn’t have the time to try the new stable version. I also translated the Docker compose for the project and extensions into .container files. In the newer version it seems they managed to remove a sidecar container.

So far, it runs on a VPS with a 4-core and 8GB of RAM. On a first run, after upgrading, it needed swap as the system started freezing and the OOM killer stopped the program, zram was enough in my case.

Besides the main container — and the sidecar — I used the Collabora container, LDAP for user management, Keycloak for auth, full Tika for OCR search — modified for my language — and Radicale. Mind you, most probably want the main container and the online office container, be it EuroOffice, Collabora or OnlyOffice.

Here is the memory usage and CPU usage on standby from podman stats:

NAME                       MEM USAGE / LIMIT  CPU %
systemd-tika               175MB / 8.054GB    0.68%
caddy                      43.35MB / 8.054GB  0.24%
systemd-ldap               67.08MB / 8.054GB  0.01%
radicale                   2.425MB / 8.054GB  0.00%
syncthing                  29.97MB / 8.054GB  0.21%
systemd-keycloak-postgres  41.12MB / 8.054GB  0.06%
systemd-keycloak           663.4MB / 8.054GB  0.75%
systemd-collabora          42.02MB / 8.054GB  0.27%
systemd-opencloud          883.4MB / 8.054GB  7.31%
systemd-collaboration      57.71MB / 8.054GB  0.31%

Setup is incredibly bad. They have a very very strict set of parameters to be able to log in at all. I have pretty much given up OK it as there is no way for me to log in for the first time with default admin credentials. It simply doesn't accept the states environment variables on docker and you get 1 attempt to log in before it gets stuck in a loop and you have to purge the image and every volume and file to get a second attempt.

uses a real filesystem and no database at all

Sounds very promising! That's what has always pushed me off Nextcloud.

I mean it's for the photos from phones. It doesn't seem to be very well suited to manage a photo archive from an actual camera (there's dozens of us!).