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 1 year 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 1 year ago

My current experience with synapse is that as a single user on my matrix server i somehow managed to have spent the entire 120 gigabytes worth of ssd i dedicated to the service.

I am really not interested in the cat gif from 5 years ago as you say. A retention of 1 week on 99% of the channels I'm in would be overkill. Private messages would realistically not be more than perhaps a few hundred megabytes (besides the media) if ever that much.

I was desperately hoping to consolidate all my messaging services under one client but it doesn't seem like a reasonable ask from the Synapse+Element combo.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

IRC.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

IRC doesn’t enforce authentication or encryption. That’s why it doesn’t rate a mention in any conversation that includes Matrix.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Depending on your config, joining a large group means syncing backlogs of weeks/months/years of posted media, so what do you expect?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year 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 1 year 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have a few matrix servers, one has 1200 members, there are no such issues you describe.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Are they federated? Did you change anything from the default / recommend settings?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They are all federated yes. I did cluster some synapse services but besides that pretty standard configuration.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you! I might give it a try again.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I must stress though that all my matrix systems have unlimited RAM and CPU at their disposal.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Well, I'd assume 8GB ram (ddr4 3200) dedicated to it and 4-6 ryzen (5700x) cores should be enough. Especially if I'm planning to host it for a max of... 30 users.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I guess, if not, you can always add more.