Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

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I think the initial sync issue is one of the worst problems, because someone joining in to leave a quick comment will be waiting for the system to synchronize. You can run the system on 1GiB/1 vCPU, but that comes with a performance penalty.

My instance of Synapse definitely can't join any matrix.org chatrooms, no matter how hard I try. Even rooms with a few hundred participants are awfully slow and leave scrollback state a broken mess. When I tried to join the main Matrix channel, both of the CPU cores I had dedicated to Synapse were pinned for at least half an hour, even after I tried to cancel joining the room!

I hope sync v3 lives up to the hype, but I'm wary. Synapse's Pythonic base seems ill-fitted for an instant messenger backend in my opinion, and no amount of protocol trickery can work around that.

It's not that I think the 1GiB is necessarily that excessive, but Dendrite and Conduit are blowing Synapse out of the park in terms of performance, to the point that I'd almost rather see the Matrix folks dedicate their development efforts more on bringing Dendrite up to speed than to expanding functionality.

Well, you can try sync v3 today via sync-v3 proxy (which is written in Go) and Hydrogen, as per the video linked in the post. It solves the initial sync problem completely; it’s not hype; it’s real.

The main thing that bogs down Synapse is if users join massive federated rooms and you end up replicating huge amounts of traffic onto your server. So we’re working on that too via Fast Joins and better-than-full-mesh federation for P2P.

The following comment is not well considered.

I once installed Litecoin Core (on Windows 10) on my desktop PC. I had Comcast (branded as Xfinity) broadband, whatever speeds my region and apartment supported. I had a 1TB monthly limit before throttling. I lived in the east SF bay area. I downloaded Litecoin Core software at the beginning of the month. I got dial-up speeds for the rest of the month. I got a 5x average bill that I had to negotiate down. Nobody on my server even cared about the federated rooms, it was just me trying to give them more flexibility.

Allowing federation with Matrix has the same issue, and I know it's being addressed, but I want to hammer this home. Self hosting means normal, poor people, too, not just EU government entities and Upcoming Big Tech partners. I know you know this, but every advocate needs reminders here and there.

Totally agreed. Our goal is to support self-hosting on an RPi on modest broadband... or just to self-host P2P on the app itself. We are categorically not optimising (in the medium/long term, at least) for requiring massive hardware in order to self-host.

> I think the initial sync issue is one of the worst problems, because someone joining in to leave a quick comment will be waiting for the system to synchronize

The initial sync issue is only a problem for large accounts which have joined many rooms. Cactus comments creates a guest user for non-logged-in commenters, and an empty guest account is pretty much instant to load in my experience.

You can go to my cactus comments instance (running on aforementioned 1gb machine) to test out the speed https://karmanyaah.malhotra.cc/tech/2021/06/website-things/

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