Nextcloud Client uses 100% CPU

One of the problems I have had with the Nextcloud Client under KDE neon is that it uses one CPU core at 100% almost constantly which causes my fan to turn on and as such annoys me. I am synchronising 700GB of files but that is no excuse.

The cure for this is to use a program called cpulimit. It can be installed, if it isn’t already, by opening Konsole and typing,

sudo apt install cpulimit

Once it is installed the way I use it to manage the Nextcloud Client is to alter the Autostart command in KDE. This command starts the Nextcloud Client when I log into my desktop.

You can find your Autostart programs by searching in the menu or by looking under Applications/Settings/System Settings/Workspace/Startup and Shutdown/Autostart. Mine looks like this.

After selecting the Nextcloud entry select Properties on the right hand side on the bottom and then choose the Application tab. Half way down there is a entry called command which currently will have the path to the program. Something like,

/usr/bin/nextcloud

To limit the CPU usage of the Nextcloud Client we are going to change that line to,

cpulimit --limit  50 -e /usr/bin/nextcloud

In English this would read,”Use cpulimit to limit to 50% the executable nextcloud”. You can change the 50 to what ever percentage you want. You want it high so it does the job faster but that the same time low so it doesn’t invoke the fan.