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.
Could you expound on what you mean, or how to go about it? Links to documentation would be appreciated.
I’m not sure your level of understanding of cloud infrastructure, so let me know if you need me to go into more detail. Disk storage, like what is attached to a VPS/VM is very expensive, and it’s the 100GB drive you have attached. What is much cheaper is object/blob storage, known in AWS and most cloud providers as S3. This is far far cheaper for many reasons.
Matrix (and really I should say Synapse, what I use) can be configured to save images, photos, uploads, etc to save to a blob storage “bucket” instead of disk. So you can lower your disk from 100 down to something lower because your data is stored in blob storage (fully encrypted). For synapse, the module you need is here: https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse-s3-storage-provider
Cheers, I appreciate you taking the time to write it out. I’m definitely no pro but I’m on my way to learning this stuff. I’ve heard of S3 but never used it. Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but it just sounds like dedicated cloud storage, maybe that has been optimized for efficiency?
Where I’m at right now is considering using my own storage. I have a lot of platter space, which yes yes I know, that is far from ideal but I was going to try it out and see just how bad the performance was. I’m aiming to host for a pretty small community (>50, probably even >25).
If you’re running locally on your own system then yes you can use your own. You can use something like MinIO or Garage to self-host an S3 bucket, and then point Matrix to that