this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
53 points (98.2% liked)

Selfhosted

60093 readers
619 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam.

  3. Posts here are to be centered around self-hosting. Please ensure it is clear in your post how it relates to self-hosting.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or git here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title.

  6. No trolling.

  7. Promotion posts require your active participation in selfhosting or related communities, or the post will be removed. No more than 10% of your posts or comments may be self-promotional, or your post will be removed. F/LOSS Exception: If your post is about a project that is completely open source & can be self-hosted in full without payment, and your account is at least 30 days old, your post is exempt from this rule as long as you continue to engage in comments.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] stratself@lemdro.id 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] iamthetot@piefed.ca 2 points 4 months ago

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.