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Troubleshooting

This page contains solutions to common problems. If you are facing any issues, please refer to this page before opening an issue.

Performance

Nextcloud AIO

If you are using AIO, these options should be configured by default.

Memories is very fast, but its performance largely depends on how well the Nextcloud instance is tuned.

  • Make sure you are running the latest stable version of Nextcloud and Memories.
  • Follow the steps in the server tuning documentation.

  • Follow all configuration steps in the configuration documentation.

    • Disable video transcoding if your server is not powerful enough.
    • Reduce the maximum size of previews to be generated.

  • Make sure you are running HTTPS (very important).

  • Enable HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 on your server.
  • Enable and configure PHP Opcache and JIT.
  • Enable and configure the APCu cache.
  • Enable and configure Redis for transactional file locking.
  • Enable gzip compression on your HTTP server for static assets (CSS/JS).

No photos are shown

This means that Memories is unable to find any indexed photos in your Nextcloud instance. Make sure you have followed the configuration steps. Note that Memories indexes photos in the background, so it may take a while for the photos to show up. Ensure that Nextcloud's cron system is properly configured and running.

Issues with Docker

Note: Using the community Nextcloud Docker image or AIO are the recommended ways of running Memories. If you are using a different image, you may run into issues. Please file any bugs you find on GitHub.

OCC commands fail

The most common reason for this is a missing interactive TTY. Make sure you run the commands with -it:

docker exec -it my_nc_container php occ memories:index
#           ^^^  <-- this is required

If you are using Nextcloud AIO, see this documentation.

OCCWeb

The OCCWeb app is deprecated, and will not work with Memories. You must use the occ command line.

Usage of tmpfs

If you are using tmpfs (e.g. for the Recognize app), make sure the temp directory is set to executable. With Docker Compose, your docker-compose.yml should look like this:

app:
    ...
    tmpfs:
    - /tmp:exec

tpmfs is automatically configured when using Nextcloud AIO v7.0.0.

Changing the binary temp directory

Alternatively, you may change the temp directory used for binary files to a different directory that is not mounted as tmpfs, and allows the executable bit to be set. Use this option with caution.

occ config:system:set memories.exiftool.tmp --value /path/to/temp/dir

Trigger compatibility mode

Memories utilizes database triggers for certain functionality and if these triggers cannot be used then the app will run in trigger compatibility mode. This mode is much slower especially on larger databases.

If your admin panel shows that Memories is running in trigger compatibility mode, try the following steps.

  1. Run occ maintenance:repair to attempt to create the triggers. This will print any errors that occur.
  2. Restart the PHP server.
  3. If you are using MySQL / MariaDB, set the log_bin_trust_function_creators option is set to 1 in your my.cnf file. If you are using docker, you can add --log_bin_trust_function_creators=true to your database container's command line. Restart the database after this and repeat steps 1 and 2.

If none of the above work or are applicable, file a bug at the repository including the output of occ maintenance:repair.

Issues with NixOS

Background index fails

When using the NixOS modules system for installation the indexer may fail on execution. In case the error is either perl not found or failed to run exiftool: ... it might be that the created nextcloud-cron services does not have access to a perl interpreter.

In that case adding perl to the path of the nextcloud-cron service might solve the issue. It can be archived by adding the following snippet to the configuration.nix

systemd.services.nextcloud-cron = {
  path = [pkgs.perl];
};

Reverse Geocoding (Places)

You need to have a MySQL / MariaDB / Postgres database for reverse geocoding to work. SQLite is not supported.

Planet DB download fails

If the planet DB download does not complete via the admin interface, you need to use the OCC command line, or increase the connection timeout values for your PHP/HTTP servers.

occ memories:places-setup

Error: Incorrect string value

If you get this error (or an Incorrect datetime value error), it is likely that your database is not using the utf8mb4 character set. Since the reverse geocoding database contains characters in various languages, it is necessary to use utf8mb4 to store them. To fix this, you need to convert your database to use utf8mb4.

You can also try changing /etc/myt.cnf in your MySQL/MariaDB server to use utf8mb4 by default:

init_connect='SET NAMES utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_unicode_ci'

Restart your database server after making this change.

General error: 2006 MySQL server has gone away

You may encounter this error where MySQL crashes during planet DB insertion. In this case, use a smaller transaction size for insertion.

occ memories:places-setup --transaction-size=5

Database table prefix

Database table prefix is not set. Cannot use database extensions (dbtableprefix).

If you do not have a database table prefix set, you cannot use the Places feature. This is a limitation of the Doctrine ORM, and no workaround is available for this. You can migrate your database to use a prefix, or disable the Places feature.

If your database does use a prefix (e.g. all tables are prefixed with oc_) and you still get this error, try setting dbtableprefix explicitly in your config.php:

'dbtableprefix' => 'oc_',

After this, run occ memories:places-setup again. More discussion on this issue can be found at #648.

Transcoding

Memories transcodes videos on the fly per-user. This saves space, but requires reasonably good hardware, preferably with hardware acceleration. Check the troubleshooting section here.

Reset

If you want to completely reset Memories (e.g. for database trouble), uninstall it from the app store, then run the following SQL on your database to clean up any data. Note that this can have unintended consequences such as some files appearing as duplicates in the mobile app when you reinstall Memories.

Note: this assumes the default prefix oc_. If you have a different prefix, replace oc_ with your prefix.

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS oc_memories;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS oc_memories_covers;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS oc_memories_failures;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS oc_memories_livephoto;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS oc_memories_mapclusters;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS oc_memories_places;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS oc_memories_planet;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS memories_planet_geometry;
DELETE FROM oc_migrations WHERE app='memories';

/* The following statements are ONLY for MySQL / MariaDB */
DROP INDEX IF EXISTS memories_parent_mimetype ON oc_filecache;
DROP INDEX IF EXISTS memories_type_tagid ON systemtag_object_mapping;
DROP TRIGGER IF EXISTS memories_fcu_trg;

/* The following statements are ONLY for Postgres */
DROP INDEX IF EXISTS memories_parent_mimetype;
DROP INDEX IF EXISTS memories_type_tagid;
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS memories_fcu_fun CASCADE;

Reinstallation

The reset will clean up all data associated with Memories. While this is safe and will not delete your files, it can sometimes have unintended side effects, such as some files appearing as duplicates in the mobile apps when you reinstall. Try running occ memories:index --force before attempting a reset.

Instruction set change

If you move from x86 to ARM or vice versa, you need to reset the paths to the architecture specific binaries.

occ config:system:delete memories.exiftool
occ config:system:delete memories.vod.path
occ config:system:delete memories.vod.ffmpeg
occ config:system:delete memories.vod.ffprobe
occ maintenance:repair