4 ms·

I registered when it was called called Vector and recently started using it more seriously. It is freaking fantastic. Voice/video calls actually works and the A

I registered when it was called called Vector and recently started using it more seriously. It is freaking fantastic. Voice/video calls actually works and the Android app is very good. It was long since I had such as strong feeling of "this is it". When it comes to protocols (as opposed to "services"), they're seldom replaced. I mean, we're still using IRC for open source projects. Matrix/Riot gives me a glimpse of the future. I recommend reading this: http://www.titus-stahl.de/blog/2016/12/21/encrypted-messengers-why-riot-and-not-signal-is-the-future/ http://www.titus-stahl.de/blog/2016/12/21/encrypted-messenge...

kuschku 10y ago
> I mean, we're still using IRC for open source projects. Matrix/Riot gives me a glimpse of the future. Matrix/Riot does tend to break down in channels with 30k users all chatting, sending hundredthousands of messages per minute. (Which is a real use case of IRC).
- riquito 10y ago
  I'm ignorant on the subject, how can hundred/thousands messages per minute be a real use case? I would expect such massive amount to be parsed by robots, not humans, and in that case why use IRC at all instead of a queue system like RabbitMQ? Maybe because it's easier to share an IRC channel than an open queue?
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Well, take QuakeNet's #eurovision during the ESC. Tenthousand users, all spamming as fast as they can type. If that is a meaningful discussion is another topic, but many chats for live evenys, especially on Twitch, have these numbers of users and messages.
  - erlend_sh 10y ago
    Think of it as a crowd cheering. You can't make out any single voice, but there's a coherency to the noise. In the same way, mass-chats conform around smileys and memes in response to whatever the crowd is viewing together.
- rhblake 10y ago
  I guess you're talking about something like Twitch? That's certainly a use case but a rather extreme and rare one. Among public IRC networks I believe QuakeNet has the record with a peak of ~240k users in total on the entire network (that was a long time ago). Channel record on QuakeNet was ~10k users. These days it looks like only two IRC networks have >30k active users in total (according to http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/ http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/) - freenode and IRCnet.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Quakenet frequently reaches 8-11k users multiple times a year, for example in #eurovision during the song contest, or in #election last november. Other networks have similar events. And yes, most of the problems I describe only appear on Twitch, or other livestream chats.
    - rhblake 10y ago
      Right. I do share your concerns about performance, but I'm sure it will improve considerably. A few months ago on reddit, one of the Matrix core devs (ara4n) answered a question about how much they can improve performance: "enormously. much of synapse's algorithms and DB schema are still unoptimised, plus python is not exactly renowned for being super-fast. we're effectively going through rewriting chunks of synapse - e.g. the new state storage representation in 0.18, and meanwhile Ruma is going through writing a cleanroom impl in Rust that should be a bajillion times faster :)" (https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/56xzyo/matrix_is_a_new_fully_open_source_distributed_im/d8nwofl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/56xzyo/matrix_is_a_n...) Ruma: https://github.com/ruma/ruma https://github.com/ruma/ruma
- Arathorn 10y ago
  How does it break down? The largest Matrix rooms we've seen have got ~50K users in them with very high traffic, and Synapse is good for at least 10 msgs/s currently (with orders of magnitude improvements on the horizon).
  - kuschku 10y ago
    Try bridging a twitch chat into matrix, and you'll see message latency go up massively, and performance go down to be unusable.
- zanny 10y ago
  There is a reimplementation of the Python based server in Rust going on right now. The Python version has proven really slow in places, and Rust is probably a great answer to shortcomings in Python performance without having to change semantics much.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    A native server with a socket-based and not longpolling based transport system would indeed solve many of the issues. But even then, Matrix will likely not scale well enough to replace Twitch's backend, or to be able to nicely handle QuakeNet's event channels. You'll also have to have a native client at that point, because the webclient also breaks down at those amounts. And you'll need to use a binary protocol or simplistic text protocol between client and server, because otherwise the user's mobile connection won't be able to handle that traffic. Matrix will have to change a lot of things before that scaling is easy.
  - bgaluszka 10y ago
    Would that rust implementation be https://www.ruma.io/ https://www.ruma.io/?

kuschku 10y ago

> I mean, we're still using IRC for open source projects. Matrix/Riot gives me a glimpse of the future. Matrix/Riot does tend to break down in channels with 30k users all chatting, sending hundredthousands of messages per minute. (Which is a real use case of IRC).

riquito 10y ago
I'm ignorant on the subject, how can hundred/thousands messages per minute be a real use case? I would expect such massive amount to be parsed by robots, not humans, and in that case why use IRC at all instead of a queue system like RabbitMQ? Maybe because it's easier to share an IRC channel than an open queue?
- kuschku 10y ago
  Well, take QuakeNet's #eurovision during the ESC. Tenthousand users, all spamming as fast as they can type. If that is a meaningful discussion is another topic, but many chats for live evenys, especially on Twitch, have these numbers of users and messages.
- erlend_sh 10y ago
  Think of it as a crowd cheering. You can't make out any single voice, but there's a coherency to the noise. In the same way, mass-chats conform around smileys and memes in response to whatever the crowd is viewing together.
rhblake 10y ago
I guess you're talking about something like Twitch? That's certainly a use case but a rather extreme and rare one. Among public IRC networks I believe QuakeNet has the record with a peak of ~240k users in total on the entire network (that was a long time ago). Channel record on QuakeNet was ~10k users. These days it looks like only two IRC networks have >30k active users in total (according to http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/ http://irc.netsplit.de/networks/) - freenode and IRCnet.
- kuschku 10y ago
  Quakenet frequently reaches 8-11k users multiple times a year, for example in #eurovision during the song contest, or in #election last november. Other networks have similar events. And yes, most of the problems I describe only appear on Twitch, or other livestream chats.
  - rhblake 10y ago
    Right. I do share your concerns about performance, but I'm sure it will improve considerably. A few months ago on reddit, one of the Matrix core devs (ara4n) answered a question about how much they can improve performance: "enormously. much of synapse's algorithms and DB schema are still unoptimised, plus python is not exactly renowned for being super-fast. we're effectively going through rewriting chunks of synapse - e.g. the new state storage representation in 0.18, and meanwhile Ruma is going through writing a cleanroom impl in Rust that should be a bajillion times faster :)" (https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/56xzyo/matrix_is_a_new_fully_open_source_distributed_im/d8nwofl/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/56xzyo/matrix_is_a_n...) Ruma: https://github.com/ruma/ruma https://github.com/ruma/ruma
Arathorn 10y ago
How does it break down? The largest Matrix rooms we've seen have got ~50K users in them with very high traffic, and Synapse is good for at least 10 msgs/s currently (with orders of magnitude improvements on the horizon).
- kuschku 10y ago
  Try bridging a twitch chat into matrix, and you'll see message latency go up massively, and performance go down to be unusable.
zanny 10y ago
There is a reimplementation of the Python based server in Rust going on right now. The Python version has proven really slow in places, and Rust is probably a great answer to shortcomings in Python performance without having to change semantics much.
- kuschku 10y ago
  A native server with a socket-based and not longpolling based transport system would indeed solve many of the issues. But even then, Matrix will likely not scale well enough to replace Twitch's backend, or to be able to nicely handle QuakeNet's event channels. You'll also have to have a native client at that point, because the webclient also breaks down at those amounts. And you'll need to use a binary protocol or simplistic text protocol between client and server, because otherwise the user's mobile connection won't be able to handle that traffic. Matrix will have to change a lot of things before that scaling is easy.
- bgaluszka 10y ago
  Would that rust implementation be https://www.ruma.io/ https://www.ruma.io/?