Hey, I'm currently doing a little research on the cost of modern social media and messaging, given that cost is an everlasting discussion when trying to move people to more free alternatives.
I am still looking for data for messaging, such as #XMPP and #Matrix. So if you have or know someone who operates a somewhat sizable instance for either XMPP or Matrix and would potentially share some details about operational cost with me I would love to hear about it! :)
@cherti You read a lot about high memory usage of Synapse due to it being written in Python etc., but the real crux in running a public Matrix server is fast database storage and overall storage. Due to its replicating nature Matrix is very database i/o heavy, meaning you need fast SSD storage and a lot of it. Database sizes of 300GB are rather common, which puts running a Matrix server way out of the league of most cheap VPS offers. In addition Synapse caches all the media uploads, which is a nice feature but also requires a lot of storage.
XMPP on the other hand might be somewhat less feature-full but the cost of running a server is basically a rounding error even for bigger deployments.
@muppeth might have some additional input as Disroot decided to shut down their rather large Synapse server a while ago and replaced it with XMPP.
Both, but primarily I'm looking at hardware/storage/domains/etc.
But I'm secondarily also interested in "staff cost".
Mostly because staff cost massively varies depending on how much volunteer work is involved in administration, moderation and development, so staff cost is way more difficult to compare, so I'm looking at that separately, if I get enough numbers about it.
But given hardware is more consistent over platforms (everybody needs it), that primarily. :)
But means that while I'm not really interested in a breakdown of what costs how much exactly, I'm mostly interested in ballpark total cost, I would want infrastructure and staff cost separately because of that.
@cherti ok, so for your data for the @JabberFR service (around 700 active and connected XMPP users right now according to https://stats.jabberfr.org ), we are at around €20/month in server costs, volunteer-run so no staff costs, and the hardware is overkill except when we hit a memory leak from time to time.
Add comment