worst offenders seem to be IRC-bridged rooms with a high join/part turnover. Such as #mozilla_#rust:matrix.org, #mozilla_#rust-offtopic:matrix.org, and #haskell:matrix.org
Riot-web has been fast enough for me, but I prefer Fractal, because GTK :)
Bridges are also choking (and gettign out of sync) in low/moderare-traffic 200 user channels where 90% don’t rejoin because bouncers. I still haven’t really seen an advantage.
It’s one of the big issues where no alternative for IRC really exists yet.
Riot also starts choking once the rooms grow over a few thousand memberd that join and part constantly — while even the simplest IRC clients handle it fine.
It’ll be interesting to see how this develops in the next years, but for now it looks like the time for Matrix to replace IRC isn’t just quite ready yet.
From the client/user point of view, riot is certainly as optimal as it is subotimal. It is fairly usable and nice, but also incredibly ressource hungry and slow at times. I would like to see more native clients (in particular console clients), but this would certainly increase friction in terms of client support for features and changes.
This also extends to the operational point of view: It’s not just that matrix/synapse is simply slow at times, it’s that the design is by default way more ressource intensive than IRC. An ircd requires basically nothing in terms of ressources to serve quite a seizable number of users. synapse on the other hand requires quite a lot of CPU power in addition to metric ton of space in it’s database (especially if your users join large rooms). Joining the main matrix channel is almost certain to cause hours of full CPU usage and increase the db size by a few hundred MB.
Of course matrix and irc provide different featuresets, but right now I feel that matrix may never be ideal for large group chats simply by design. I can’t quite see how rooms like the matrix main channel will ever be “ok” for a matrix server.
All this being said, matrix works nicely for one-on-one and small group chats, which is what most of my users do.
The actual design of the Matrix spec doesn’t have any issues that I have seen but the current software seems more like a prototype in production. Hopefully dendrite and some updates to riot can speed everything up because thats one of the main issues I see with it now.
Yeah, that’s what I’ve seen so far, too. The spec is great, but the implementation is rather meh. Which means that at least it should be easy to fix later on.
The spec does require a lot more resources than IRC, though, specifically in the form of maintaining logs and allowing searching of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other implementations/settings that come out to auto-kill logs after a month or something (I don’t think that necessarily violates the spec and is pretty handy for GDPR)
We also do log storage and fulltext search in the Quassel bouncer (and its ecosystem), and yet we don’t have nearly as much performance issues as Matrix does.
This is mostly an implementation problem, I’m sure it can be fixed over the years.
Just tried Fractal on Mac OS. Amazing (and a bit horrible) that it looks exactly like Gnome. Perhaps somebody (me?!) will make a decent version in the future, though.
I’ve been using Matrix as a glorified IRC bouncer for over a year, it’s pretty good, but Synapse still occasionally chokes on “forward extremities” and becomes completely unresponsive so you have to run a SQL query to clean up and wait for a while for it to become responsive again :(
Riot-web has been fast enough for me, but I prefer Fractal, because GTK :)
Bridges are also choking (and gettign out of sync) in low/moderare-traffic 200 user channels where 90% don’t rejoin because bouncers. I still haven’t really seen an advantage.
It’s one of the big issues where no alternative for IRC really exists yet.
Riot also starts choking once the rooms grow over a few thousand memberd that join and part constantly — while even the simplest IRC clients handle it fine.
It’ll be interesting to see how this develops in the next years, but for now it looks like the time for Matrix to replace IRC isn’t just quite ready yet.
From the client/user point of view, riot is certainly as optimal as it is subotimal. It is fairly usable and nice, but also incredibly ressource hungry and slow at times. I would like to see more native clients (in particular console clients), but this would certainly increase friction in terms of client support for features and changes.
This also extends to the operational point of view: It’s not just that matrix/synapse is simply slow at times, it’s that the design is by default way more ressource intensive than IRC. An ircd requires basically nothing in terms of ressources to serve quite a seizable number of users. synapse on the other hand requires quite a lot of CPU power in addition to metric ton of space in it’s database (especially if your users join large rooms). Joining the main matrix channel is almost certain to cause hours of full CPU usage and increase the db size by a few hundred MB.
Of course matrix and irc provide different featuresets, but right now I feel that matrix may never be ideal for large group chats simply by design. I can’t quite see how rooms like the matrix main channel will ever be “ok” for a matrix server.
All this being said, matrix works nicely for one-on-one and small group chats, which is what most of my users do.
The actual design of the Matrix spec doesn’t have any issues that I have seen but the current software seems more like a prototype in production. Hopefully dendrite and some updates to riot can speed everything up because thats one of the main issues I see with it now.
Yeah, that’s what I’ve seen so far, too. The spec is great, but the implementation is rather meh. Which means that at least it should be easy to fix later on.
The spec does require a lot more resources than IRC, though, specifically in the form of maintaining logs and allowing searching of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are other implementations/settings that come out to auto-kill logs after a month or something (I don’t think that necessarily violates the spec and is pretty handy for GDPR)
We also do log storage and fulltext search in the Quassel bouncer (and its ecosystem), and yet we don’t have nearly as much performance issues as Matrix does.
This is mostly an implementation problem, I’m sure it can be fixed over the years.
I have been using fractal as well. I like the gui but it does seem to use a high amount of CPU usage. Also doesn’t support end to end crypto yet.
Just tried Fractal on Mac OS. Amazing (and a bit horrible) that it looks exactly like Gnome. Perhaps somebody (me?!) will make a decent version in the future, though.