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.
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.
IRC.
Depending on your config, joining a large group means syncing backlogs of weeks/months/years of posted media, so what do you expect?
Not waiting 20 minutes in 2023 for a messaging platform to sync if I join a single group with default settings.
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.
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.
I have a few matrix servers, one has 1200 members, there are no such issues you describe.
Are they federated? Did you change anything from the default / recommend settings?
They are all federated yes. I did cluster some synapse services but besides that pretty standard configuration.