this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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How "heavy" is self-hosting matrix really? (programming.dev)
submitted 5 hours ago by chasteinsect@programming.dev to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
19 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

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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[–] northernlights@lemmy.today 7 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

And, importantly, run the db on postgre, not sqlite, and implement the regular db maintenance steps explained in the wiki. I've been running mine like that in a small VM for about 6 months, i join large communities, run whatsapp, gmessages and discord bridges, and my DB is 400MB.

Before when I was still testing and didn't implement the regular db maintenance it balloned up to 10GB in 4 months.

screenshot of cloudbeaver

[–] drkt@scribe.disroot.org 5 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

It is my understanding that all of the ballooning DB is room states, something that you can't really prune. What exactly are you pruning from the DB?

[–] northernlights@lemmy.today 3 points 1 hour ago

I purge 2 weeks old media using these. Then I purge the largest rooms' history events using these. Then I compress the DB using this.

It looks like this:

export PGPASSWORD=$DB_PASS
export MYTOKEN="mytokengoeshere"
export TIMESTAMP=$(date --date='2 weeks ago' '+%s%N' | cut -b1-13)

echo "DB size:"
psql --host core -U synapse_user -d synapse -c "SELECT pg_size_pretty(pg_database_size('synapse'));"

echo "Purging remote media"
curl \
	-X POST \
	--header "Authorization: Bearer $MYTOKEN" \
	"http://localhost:8008/_synapse/admin/v1/purge_media_cache?before_ts=%24%7BTIMESTAMP%7D"

echo ''
echo 'Purging local media'
curl \
	-X POST \
	--header "Authorization: Bearer $MYTOKEN" \
	"http://localhost:8008/_synapse/admin/v1/media/delete?before_ts=%24%7BTIMESTAMP%7D"

echo ''
echo 'Purging room Arch Linux'
export ROOM='!usBJpHiVDuopesfvJo:archlinux.org'
curl \
	-X POST \
	--header "Authorization: Bearer $MYTOKEN" \
	--data-raw '{"purge_up_to_ts":'${TIMESTAMP}'}' \
	"http://localhost:8008/_synapse/admin/v1/purge_history/$%7BROOM%7D"

echo ''
echo 'Purging room Arch Offtopic'
export ROOM='!zGNeatjQRNTWLiTpMb:archlinux.org'
curl \
	-X POST \
	--header "Authorization: Bearer $MYTOKEN" \
	--data-raw '{"purge_up_to_ts":'${TIMESTAMP}'}' \
	"http://localhost:8008/_synapse/admin/v1/purge_history/$%7BROOM%7D"

echo ''
echo 'Compressing db'
/home/northernlights/scripts/synapse_auto_compressor -p postgresql://$DB_USER:$DB_PASS@$DB_HOST/$DB_NAME -c 500 -n 100

echo "DB size:"
psql --host core -U synapse_user -d synapse -c "SELECT pg_size_pretty(pg_database_size('synapse'));"

unset PGPASSWORD

And periodically I run vacuum;