[kenmacd]

My main issue with self-hosting has been federation bandwidth requirements. I joined the very quiet `#homeowners:matrix.org` announcement room, but because almost 600 other people are in there my server was inundated with presence messages (just in case I wanted to know which of those 600 were online right now).

Oh, and there's no way to prevent receiving these messages. They arrive on the same endpoint as non-presence messages, and you can't signal to the sender to stop sending them.

[gen3]

I’ve been hosting my own matrix server for just a few months now. I have a small handful of users. Bandwidth hasn’t been a problem for me, as I’ve only served 5GB in the last 30 days. It’s the sheer number of requests that the server handles that I find staggering. In the last 30 days, my server has handled 1.3mm requests!

It seems like everything polls for data, which I see as wasteful. I recently saw they were adding socket support in a recent MSC... hopefully that will help.

[adidalal]

Unfortunately not a solution for federation with other servers, but you can disable presence on Matrix servers you control.

For this playbook, use these variables:

  matrix_synapse_use_presence: false
  matrix_client_element_enable_presence_by_hs_url: {"https://matrix.yourserver.com": false}

[kenmacd]

Thank you. I had that set for my server, but I just wish there was a way to tell other servers not to send them. Disabling them on my server turns them in to a no-op, but it still has to process all those requests.