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.
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I’ve been running same ubuntu 18.04->20.04->22.04->24.04 virtual machine for matrix with synapse since 2019.
I’ve run it virtualized on multiple different thin clients, and in fact still do, on a t640. I’ve given 8gb ram and a few cores for it.
On slower cpus, such as the ones the thin clients I used before t640, loading a large room could take some time.
Conduit, around 100 users, barely breaks 0% usage in a Intel i5 micro PC. RAM is around 1GB used.
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.
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.
Continuwuity… Don’t use synapse, too bloated.
I’m eager to try out multiple things. Right now I’d settle for whichever I can get set up. The documentation for continuwuity is a little tough for me and my setup right now.
If that’s hard, good luck with synapse then.
Welp, I got Synapse deployed before Continuwuity lol
Thanks, I’ll probably need it! I seem to be able to follow along a little bit better with Synapse at least, and there’s more troubleshooting stuff out there for it I think because it’s more widely used.
This. Its not that hard to setup.
I’m struggling a bit. I got the server up and text chat is working great, but the documentation for getting voice calls working is pretty hard to follow.
My searching around has failed to find a more step by step guide for modifying the gigantic sample continuwuity.toml file. It’s so unwieldy, and it feels impossible to know if there are some additional settings that need to be configured that I’m simply missing due to the length of the file.
Any tips, tricks, or guides you’re willing would be appreciated!
jade-liveit-guide.continuwuity.pages.dev/calls
the call docs are being rewritten to reflect latest developments. Join the Matrix room for further help too, it’s quite active these days
Join the matrix room, they like to help out.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters DNS Domain Name Service/System SSD Solid State Drive mass storage VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) XMPP Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (‘Jabber’) for open instant messaging
[Thread #89 for this comm, first seen 13th Feb 2026, 15:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Follow up question for voice/video servers in general.
If I want to host a server that allows video calls, do I need GPU hardware acceleration?
I’d like to set up a matrix server on my home server (or a xmpp server) but I haven’t been able to figure how to do that. All the docs talk about setting up a vps with a domain name.I don’t have a vps or a domain name and don’t wanna have to pay monthly to a hobby. (I’m poor in a poor country)
any internet connected server should do but you will need a domain name as they’re how your matrix server identifies itself to the network
Cool! Can I use a ddns like duckdns? I only use my server through a VPN so I haven’t looked into hardening and security stuff to open it to the internet yet. Maybe I’ll just try setting a matrix server soon. Thanks!
theoretically yeah but you might have some issues with blocklists on other servers. there are cheap domain names available if even $1/yr is an option for you https://gen.xyz/1111b
edit to add- if you buy a domain from cloudflare or any other domain registrar with an API, you can create your own dynamic DNS by running a script on your server to update the domain’s DNS automatically in a similar way to duckdns. more reading available at https://github.com/ddclient/ddclient
Self hosted XMPP easy mode
This is unrelated to my question.
Yeah, true. But I saw people mentioning XMPP in the comments and thought the link might be helpful for some. It’s not like it’s wildly unrelated to the topic… I stand by it.
Why the hell people keep saying Continuwity. I can’t find any software with that name. Do they mean Conduit? I’m so confused. The two words are nothing alike.
Ty. I searched on DDG and no results came up. I need to find a new search engine.
It was genuinely hard for me to find on DDG as well. It kept trying to correct to “continuity” >_>
