Hacker News Reader

Comment by ReverseCold | Hacker News Reader

The matrix homeserver is... suboptimal. I'm running it for a personal instance (two users), and it's using insane amounts of RAM (4-8 GB) and still managing to lag (even though I gave it 4 cores on a Ryzen 2700X). Forget talking in a matrix.org room, even talking to people on other personal/single user servers isn't fully stable.

There is a replacement homeserver (https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite) but it's not done yet.

Also, client support is awful. The only one I can reasonably tell a non-technical user to use is Riot - but that's somehow more resource hungry than the Slack desktop app. There are good ones, but they are either only for technical users (weechat) or are extremely barebones (nheko, quaternion).

View on HN

Disclosure: i work on Matrix.

We're basically doing nothing but fixing Synapse's performance problems currently, and improvements are on the horizon. We're late because we got sidetracked fixing flaws in the protocol, but as of the last few weeks we're back on perf again. So far we've sped up /sync by 2x and reduced CPU by about 20%, but the RAM improvements should land over the coming weeks unless we have further distractions.

Meanwhile, on Riot, we're busy landing performance fixes which should make it much less resource hungry than Slack. These are literally landing as we speak: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/2970, https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/pull/3331 etc.

Why is you current solution so ressource hungry?

I mean, my 10-active-users off-the-shelf XMPP server (ejabberd) uses about 100MB RAM currently.

a 10 active user Synapse should use about 1GB max, so unsure what’s up with the earlier post. The reason it’s currently so much heavier than XMPP is that resource usage scales with the size of rooms being participated in, not the number of connected users - and we aggressively cache those rooms in RAM. However, 100MB is a much more sensible target and we’re busy optimising to try to shrink things down.

> a 10 active user Synapse should use about 1GB max, so unsure what’s up with the earlier post

It's actually not as bad as I remember (time made me think it's worse than it really is) - it's really only large rooms that feel slow. Oops.

I just guess the whole thing doesn't feel responsive. Messages sent take a while to sync between different clients, etc.

Maybe you want to see the preview of our work in progress? https://nayego.net/ Open Source, real Open Standards, mature technology, decentralised/federated/distributed, and a great UX.

Fit for orgs with external partners, providers, customers, freelances, remote and home office workers...

I might have missed something, but your website doesn't provide much information, and I've been unable to find any elsewhere (only an empty GitHub repository).

edit: btw, the number of comments you've made in this thread to “sell” your solution is… abusive?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com