Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

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I'm running it on my own server and performance is quite acceptable. Picking the right client is very important, though; Element isn't always the fastest, and I find Cinny's UX to be much better for general chat, which is clearly very much… inspired by Discord. On the other hand, Element is ahead in terms of features and protocol support (like the (live) location sharing feature), but Fluffychat has the superior mobile app in terms of general look and feel IMO. On the desktop, Nheko is incredibly fast, being written in a native language and being optimized for performance and all, but I don't use it because I just can't get used to the design.

When joining huge chat rooms like some of those on the matrix.org homeserver, it can take a bit for the clients to sync up and get going. Performance is getting improved all the time, especially in terms of quickly joining a room. Latency also doesn't help, the protocol requires loads of round trips for the JSON payloads to go back and forth, so if you're not near your homeserver you're going to see some annoying problems.

I recommend giving the platform another quick try using https://app.cinny.in/ which to me feels very Discord-like in terms of snappiness.

Cinny user registration told me my username was already taken, and threw up a never ending captcha[0]. I nevertheless got a "validate your email" in my inbox, although I can't login. Not, like, a great start.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/zYBZWoW

https://github.com/cinnyapp/cinny/issues/664 Thanks for the bug report.

I'm not sure the problem was the client (element for Android). Asking around it seems people on the chatrooms kind of agreed the issue was matrix.org

Regardless, if you believe the issue is the client, which would you recommend is the lightest/fastest client?

The problem of slow joins isn't the client, it's the protocol. Just join the Synapse admins channel on matrix.org (will take half an hour to load, your client will time out and give you an error but it will load eventually) and the other admins will tell you they're all aware of the problem.

Shocking to see Arathorn deflecting about this. I run a server and just never use federation to avoid the problem.

Not sure why I keep getting flagged

I disagree that the protocol is the problem. There's a combination of frontend/backend issues impacting performance, but servers written in faster languages don't seem to struggle with joining channels all that much.

Synapse being written in Python seems like a much bigger problem to me. This problem only exists in rooms not already available on the server, though; if you register with matrix.org then matrix.org rooms won't suffer nearly as much as running your own server.

Sadly, alternatives like Conduit still aren't fully-featured and they probably won't ever be as focus lies on the Element ecosystem. It's a real shame.

I’m not deflecting - i’m just trying to figure out which slowness folks are complaining about. Is it really slow joins over federation (which is absolutely a real problem, which is why we’re busy implementing https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/milestone/6). Or is it Element Android being sluggish when changing rooms? Or is it a slow server being slow to send messages?

My point was that saying “matrix is slow” is unhelpful given it’s completely unclear what aspect is being complained about.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32020929

The problem of slow joins isn't the client, it's the protocol. Just join the Synapse admins channel on matrix.org (will take half an hour to load, your client will time out and give you an error but it will load eventually) and the other admins will tell you they're all aware of the problem.

I don't know why Arathorn is further down the thread dismissing this problem.. it's a well-known problem in the community..

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/1211 there's the seven year old bug

Thank you for this, I was beginning to think I'm the crazy one.

Ok, so matrix is useless then, is that it?

They're talking about a specific issue with federation at scale. I run a hybrid conference in Seattle and we use Matrix. I make a successful living out of this, so it seems a stretch to call it useless.

E-mail has much bigger scale and is fast

A single email messages often takes minutes to receive. Conversations are usually highly asynchronous. I wouldn't call it fast, exactly.

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