Unless I am blind or my search-fu is hugely failing me, I cannot for the life of me find any information on the recommended/minimum specs to self-host the matrix backend services. I’m trying to spin up a VM just to play around with it and see if I like it. Specifically, I’m looking at Synapse or Continuwuity. Any advice?
Looking for vCPUs, memory, storage.
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I’ve been running same ubuntu 18.04->20.04->22.04->24.04 virtual machine for matrix with synapse since 2019.
I’ve run it virtualized on multiple different thin clients, and in fact still do, on a t640. I’ve given 8gb ram and a few cores for it.
On slower cpus, such as the ones the thin clients I used before t640, loading a large room could take some time.
Conduit, around 100 users, barely breaks 0% usage in a Intel i5 micro PC. RAM is around 1GB used.
Few of the answers given were concrete. So here’s my take.
I am able to run singleuser Continuwuity on a 8GB RAM Pi machine with 4 cores, and join many large rooms (around >=1000 users, although the number of homeservers in the room is a more suitable metric). It would use around 2GB RAM, but you can tune it for less (basically reduce cache values, but ask in the room for more advice).
After a few months the database hovers at around 2GB, because the database uses zstd compression by default. It’s not anyhow a major problem like Synapse, just don’t use HDD for storage and you should be fine.
For best experience, I also selfhost a dedicated caching resolver (unbound) for continuwuity. That takes like a few hundred more MBs of memory.
Given the fact you’d like to play around with it, a mid-tier VM/VPS (2CPU, 2GB RAM, 20GB SSD) is a reasonable starting choice. For a non-federating server, it can take a lot less resource than this.
Thanks for the detailed response! Those specs are very close to what I ended up getting a Synapse server running on. I would like to try getting Continuwuity going next and compare.
Most of the requirements are going to be for the database, and that depends on:
- How many active users you expect
- How many large rooms you or your users join
I left many of the large Matrix spaces I was in, and mine is now mostly just 1:1 chats or a group chat with a handful of friends. Given that low-usage case, I can run my server on a Pi 3 with 4 GB of RAM quite comfortably. I don’t do that in practice, but I do have that setup as a backup server - it periodically syncs the database from my main server - and works fine. The bottleneck there, really, is the SD card storage since I didn’t want an external SSD hanging off of it.
Even when I was active in several large Matrix spaces/rooms, a USFF Optiplex with a quad core i5, 8 GB of RAM, and a 500GB SSD was more than enough to run it comfortably alongside some other services like LibreTranslate.
Continuwuity… Don’t use synapse, too bloated.
I’m eager to try out multiple things. Right now I’d settle for whichever I can get set up. The documentation for continuwuity is a little tough for me and my setup right now.
If that’s hard, good luck with synapse then.
Welp, I got Synapse deployed before Continuwuity lol
Thanks, I’ll probably need it! I seem to be able to follow along a little bit better with Synapse at least, and there’s more troubleshooting stuff out there for it I think because it’s more widely used.
It looks good, I’m considering it. But the ‘uwu’ makes my eyes hurt. Might not be possible to overcome the name to install it.
Really?
Well, thats first.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
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I’d like to set up a matrix server on my home server (or a xmpp server) but I haven’t been able to figure how to do that. All the docs talk about setting up a vps with a domain name.I don’t have a vps or a domain name and don’t wanna have to pay monthly to a hobby. (I’m poor in a poor country)
any internet connected server should do but you will need a domain name as they’re how your matrix server identifies itself to the network
Cool! Can I use a ddns like duckdns? I only use my server through a VPN so I haven’t looked into hardening and security stuff to open it to the internet yet. Maybe I’ll just try setting a matrix server soon. Thanks!
theoretically yeah but you might have some issues with blocklists on other servers. there are cheap domain names available if even $1/yr is an option for you https://gen.xyz/1111b
edit to add- if you buy a domain from cloudflare or any other domain registrar with an API, you can create your own dynamic DNS by running a script on your server to update the domain’s DNS automatically in a similar way to duckdns. more reading available at https://github.com/ddclient/ddclient
As others have already alluded to, Matrix is a bit odd in that regard as it runs a distributed database and the resource requirements depend on how much of the matrix network is mirrored on it. A single power-user can cause huge resource use just by connecting to a lot of federated active rooms. On the other hand a server that is mostly used as a private family chat can run on a modern RasberryPI without much problems.
Synapse or Conduwinity etc. makes little difference in praxis as both need to do the same database merging operations.
I do appreciate that, but even a starting point would be nice.
Starting point based on what? Do you plan to use it personally to join many large channels from FOSS projects? If so, you need to plan for a relativrly beefy VPS, like 4 core, 8gb ram, 100gb+ ssd storage.
But for small private chats with no federation a cheap minimum VPS can work.
If you want my personal recommendation I would avoid hosting Matrix. A well federated server is costly to run and not really worth the hassle and a small private chat server with bridges etc can be done equally well or better with XMPP.
I did not ask for a recommendation of if I should use or not use Matrix. I stated in OP that I want to play around with it. I will decide if it’s right for my use-case.
Why the hell people keep saying Continuwity. I can’t find any software with that name. Do they mean Conduit? I’m so confused. The two words are nothing alike.
It’s a fork of a fork or Conduit.
Got it.
Ty. I searched on DDG and no results came up. I need to find a new search engine.
It was genuinely hard for me to find on DDG as well. It kept trying to correct to “continuity” >_>
