Synapse scalabilitySomething which we've been quietly adding over the last 6 months is support for running large synapse deployments like the homeserver.
To find out more and get upgraded if you haven't already, please check out the full changelog. Meanwhile, we're waiting for the last bits of the end-to-end encryption APIs to land there before releasing 0.3 of the Matrix spec, which should happen any day now. Spec for all of these new APIs are currently making their way into the official matrix spec you can see the work in progress at.
Folks using the Debian Stable packages must upgrade immediately. There was a bug in 0.18.0 that meant this process was very slow (weeks) on sqlite DBs and chewed 100% CPU this was fixed in 0.18.1, and subsequently we've also had 0.18.2 (various perf and bug fixes, and a new modular internal API for authentication) and the current release: 0.18.3 to address a major vulnerability on deployments using LDAP with obsolete versions (0.9.x) of the python ldap3 library - e.g. You can tell when it's finished based on whether it's stopped logging about the 'background_deduplicate_state' task. The first time you run synapse after upgrading to 0.18 it will go through your database deleting all the historical data, after which you can VACUUM the db to reclaim the freed diskspace. If not, there's never been a better time to run your own homeserver! The main improvement is that the Matrix room state updates are now stored as deltas in the database rather than snapshots, which reduces the size of the database footprint by around 5 - 7x.
So without further delay here's an update on all things Matrix! Synapse 0.18Back in September, we forgot to properly announce the 0.18 release of Synapse! This is a major oversight given that 0.18 was a huge update with some critical performance improvements, but hopefully everyone has upgraded by now anyway. Another season has passed the leaves are dropping from the trees in the northern hemisphere (actually, in the time it's taken us to finish this post, most of them have dropped :-/) and once again the Matrix team has been hacking away too furiously to properly update the blog.