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Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

yaky.dev

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Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#71

Post by Arathorn »

Aurornis wrote: post #65

> While technically, Synapse can work with a sqlite database (and which at first seems like an OK choice for having Does anyone have any more information on this? Running Postgres is not a big deal, but I would expect SQLite to be fine given how well it works in my experience.

I've not seen many corrupted sqlite databases, but because Synapse is not currently storage-efficient you can end up with some terrifying large (100GB+) sqlite databases which might as well be corrupted.

We only ever supported sqlite for ease of tinkering; it was never intended to be used in production, and in retrospect supporting it at all was a mistake.

In terms of synapse storage efficiency and how to improve it, folks may be interested in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5zAgVYBuGk&t=1851s

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#72

Post by 0x1ch »

lousken wrote: post #34

Same setup here since 2017. Since then, RAM usage decreased by 60%. The admin panel is not something I'd need but it would be a nice-to-have. Started with postgres as I wouldn't go for anything else if I wanna use it for decades. It has 2.5GBs for 10users and I don't mind if it takes 10 or 20, that's something I expected. Never did a cleanup of anything, I just dumped the db and moved to OVH recently onto a new VPS w…

Whatever is going on in Matrix land isn't stable enough for most people to switch. I gave up after they broke their calling system after changing something to this livekit system. It doesn't work, my existing TURN server became useless, and Matrix was left as a very slow chat application.

I'm over it.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#73

Post by Arathorn »

styanax wrote: post #6

As a former user I felt these pain points trying to do nothing more than have a very active one-on-one chat with a good friend. Tens of messages an hour, maybe 2 years running. Using matrix.org and the pre-X clients. It's fine for group chat (IRC style) but that's not a high bar. (a) the encryption between using a mobile and the webapp desyncs/breaks all the time, it just sucks. I mean you'll get "cannot decrypt" a l…

I'm sorry you had a crap time, and agreed that in the past things were not great. But in defence of the Matrix team, we fixed almost all known encryption in ~Sept 2024, and the new generation of clients fixes the slow sync issues.

In terms of message retention: https://element-hq.github.io/synapse/latest/message_retentio... is how you should have/could have cleaned up those rooms. (It's not exposed in Element's UI yet as we've been prioritising more fundamental stuff).

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#74

Post by Arathorn »

The_President wrote: post #47

Ran a homeserver for 5 years on a minimal VPS and it worked fine. Upsides - works everywhere, self hosted, feature complete. Client software in the ecosystem mostly felt bloated, with the exception of NeoChat. By 2022 the clients could no longer call each other. Decommissioned it this year in favor of traditional XMPP which works fine and it's nice that notifications are appropriately processed, finally. Our team hig…

We did address the elephant eventually with https://github.com/element-hq/element-admin a few months ago.

In terms of VoIP interop - yes, one of the worst bits of Matrix is that the legacy 1:1 VoIP calling is not interoperable with MatrixRTC-based (multiparty) VoIP calling, but we ran out of time/cash to implement interop and instead focused on making MatrixRTC work well. (Does XMPP give you E2EE multiparty calling ooi?)

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#75

Post by Arathorn »

nonamesleft wrote: post #36

Ran synapse for a few months, figured out all the tui clients are either abandonware or broken (originally thought i could use bitlbee, and did the install before realizing it was unusable). Looked at current tui offerings now some years later, situation seems to be unchanged, the only client that ran back then was gomuks, and that has received a rewrite that hasn't reached feature parity yet. I am probably the type…

iamb is pretty good and not abandonware, fwiw: https://github.com/ulyssa/iamb

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#76

Post by bronson »

tcfhgj wrote: post #10
styanax wrote: post #6

As a former user I felt these pain points trying to do nothing more than have a very active one-on-one chat with a good friend. Tens of messages an hour, maybe 2 years running. Using matrix.org and the pre-X clients. It's fine for group chat (IRC style) but that's not a high bar. (a) the encryption between using a mobile and the webapp desyncs/breaks all the time, it just sucks. I mean you'll get "cannot decrypt" a l…

a) is really not a big issue any more b) yeah, X solves it (via sliding sync)

a) As of when? I had a "cannot decrypt" room failure on matrix.org a year ago.

b) Unfortunately, X breaks other important things, like audio/video calls. It currently feels like an alpha-quality release: buggy and lots of missing features. Not ready for widespread use.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#77

Post by meatmanek »

Aurornis wrote: post #65

> While technically, Synapse can work with a sqlite database (and which at first seems like an OK choice for having Does anyone have any more information on this? Running Postgres is not a big deal, but I would expect SQLite to be fine given how well it works in my experience.

I use sqlite for my 2-user server and haven't had any issues in the several years I've been running it.

It's possible to corrupt a sqlite database file, but generally it shouldn't happen unless you're doing something weird with it. https://www.sqlite.org/howtocorrupt.html

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#78

Post by lousken »

0x1ch wrote: post #72
lousken wrote: post #34

Same setup here since 2017. Since then, RAM usage decreased by 60%. The admin panel is not something I'd need but it would be a nice-to-have. Started with postgres as I wouldn't go for anything else if I wanna use it for decades. It has 2.5GBs for 10users and I don't mind if it takes 10 or 20, that's something I expected. Never did a cleanup of anything, I just dumped the db and moved to OVH recently onto a new VPS w…

Whatever is going on in Matrix land isn't stable enough for most people to switch. I gave up after they broke their calling system after changing something to this livekit system. It doesn't work, my existing TURN server became useless, and Matrix was left as a very slow chat application. I'm over it.

I don't plan to give up just yet. Switching is way too difficult and I don't see many platforms having both solid desktop and mobile versions with e2ee.

But if they dare rewriting anything again from scratch I am leaving. They MUST stick with what they have and make it good at this point.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#79

Post by seryvtva »

lousken wrote: post #34

Same setup here since 2017. Since then, RAM usage decreased by 60%. The admin panel is not something I'd need but it would be a nice-to-have. Started with postgres as I wouldn't go for anything else if I wanna use it for decades. It has 2.5GBs for 10users and I don't mind if it takes 10 or 20, that's something I expected. Never did a cleanup of anything, I just dumped the db and moved to OVH recently onto a new VPS w…

I ran my own matrix server for a number of years, then learned that any matrix homeserver would happily serve up any media from matrix without authentication. I shut it down the next day because I have no desire to operate a proxy for downloading csam.

A url like https://my.domain.com/_matrix/media// would happily proxy the bad media through my server.

I think they've fixed this, but it's not worth the risk to me.

Re: Self-hosting a Matrix server for 5 years

#80

Post by Arathorn »

jchw wrote: post #49
philipallstar wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe some day I will be less bitter. I mean, Matrix is free, how much can I really be angry if it didn't work how I wanted it to. But, it's hard. I tried to buy in hard, and wound up making a lot of trouble for me and a small group of people that I inadvertently looped into my own mess. I trusted Matrix because it seemed to be the leading option, but definitely I will now be much, much more careful before adopting…

In a healthier ecosystem with many stakeholders and sponsors this is less of a concern. However, instead of Matrix Foundation gaining more independence, it seems like almost everything moved out of the Matrix Foundation and into a for-profit company. Clearly, things didn't go according to plan. Most of us just running homeservers are just random people who have no power over this situation and not enough money to mak…

I get the frustration that Dendrite dev has stalled, but the fault here is not of an evil take-over by Element (given Element wrote both Dendrite and Synapse in the first place) but simply neither Element and Matrix Foundation having the $ to do be able to maintain two homeservers simultaneously.

> Now the free and open source Matrix homeserver has to compete with a closed source commercial one

This isn't really the case - normal open source Synapse is the core focus for Element, and the vast majority of work is going into that, including performance work. Synapse Pro is "just" for scalability and HA for big government-scale deployments - https://element.io/blog/scaling-to-millions-of-users-require... etc. But all the schema work etc which supports that goes into FOSS Synapse.

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