this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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Is federated matrix / synapse actually usable now with large groups? any alternatives? (alien.top)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hey guys!

A year or so ago I tried hosting a federated matrix and synapse server. While at the beginning it seemed nice, the moment I tried to join a large room it died completely for 10-20 minutes while blasting my DNS server with 10K+ requests. Sometimes at the end it wouldn't join, while filling the logs with errors. It really didn't seem like a good user-experience. Ironically, one of the groups I tried to join was the support group, but I failed, because it was too big.

I am wondering if it has improved since, or it's pretty much the same.

At the same time, I'm also wondering if there's a good, fast self-hosted alternative, that kinda just works.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not waiting 20 minutes in 2023 for a messaging platform to sync if I join a single group with default settings.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

You do understand that running a federated server means that you are taking over hosting duties for that chat protocol, right? I wonder, why do you want to run a federation outpost if the requirements to do that seem annoying to you? Just join the group via matrix.org's own server and you are settled, they have the knowledge and the resources to run a proper matrix server.

Edit "a single group" with maybe hundred thousands of cat gifs takes a while to sync unless you instruct your server to omit the backlog.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Sorry - so the default, recommended settings try to cache absolutely everything from a single group, including cat gifs posted 5 years ago? I'm sorry, but I expected the default settings more... sane?

Well, I wanted to try hosting myself, since I love self hosting things and people keep repeating how amazing Matrix is - my experience (waiting 20 minutes to join a single group, or it simply failing) didn't convince me. It's possible that I'm the wrong here, in that case I'm happy to hear solutions.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I have no idea, I have zero desire to host a matrix server. But I wanted to have one, I would make sure to check what the actual requirements in terms of bandwidth and storage are and what will happen if I fire up the server.

It's like hosting a TOR exit node and then complaining about all the data going over my network.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Oh, so you never even had a matrix server hosted, but you're telling me I'm wrong. Hahaha!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

That's normal on this sub. People chime in with their opinion not their experience.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I just say you seem extremely uninformed for somebody who want to run a federation outpost, i.e. from the FAQ: https://matrix.org/docs/older/faq/

Why is the state_groups_state table so large? What is it storing? Room state takes up a lot of space! To be specific, regular snapshots are taken of room states, so you can rapidly find out the state for historical events.

Why is it so important to record this, and to know the past room state including full member list?

It's needed to enable access control and state resolution, for example the homeserver needs to be able to decide:

"who can see this message at that point in time?" "what was the state of the room was when this message was received, and so is it allowed to be received?" Synapse stores these snapshots approximately every 100 messages, with deltas in between.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Well, I can't recall every minute detail I've delt with a year ago. I shared my past experience and asked if it would be more or less the same.