this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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Hi. I'm kinda of a noob in the world of self-hosting and matrix, for that matter. But I was wondering how heavy is it to host a matrix server?

My understanding how matrix works is each participating server in the room stores the full history and then later some sort of merging happens or something like that.

How is that sustainable? Say in 5 years matrix becomes mainstream and 5 people join my server and each also join 3 different 10k+ people rooms with long histories. So now what I have to account for that or people have to be careful of joining larger rooms when they sign up in a smaller-ish server?

Or do I not understand how Matrix works? Thanks.

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[–] pcouy@lemmy.pierre-couy.fr 19 points 15 hours ago

I don't know about other homeserver implementations but synapse kinda sucks. It used to randomly eat 100% of 1 or 2 CPU cores (including the database) until I tracked it down to 3 rooms having a messed up state which caused costly SQL queries. I removed the rooms from my server (using a third party admin panel because there's no proper admin GUI built in, the documentation just mentions curl commands to hit the admin API, with placeholders to manually replace). It has been fine since I did it, but I'm the only user on my server. And I expect other issues to come up at any time...

It also eats a lot of storage, mostly the database. It grew very large quickly, but it's more stable now