Ingo Juergensmann: The Fediverse What About Resources?
Today ist May, 1st. In about two weeks on May, 15th WhatsApp will put their changed Terms of Service into action and when you don t accept their rules you won t be able to use WhatsApp any longer.
Early this year there was already a strong movement away from WhatsApp towards other solutions. Mainly to Signal, but also some other services like the Fediverse gained some new users. And also XMPP got their fair share of new users.
So, what to do about the WhatsApp ToS change then? Shall we go all to Signal? Surely not. Signal is another vendor lock-in silo. It s centralistic and recent development plans want to implement some crypto payment system. Even Bruce Schneier thinks that this is a bad idea.
Other alternatives often named include Matrix/Element or XMPP. Today, Don di Dislessia in the (german) Fediverse asked about power consumption of the Fediverse incl. Matrix and XMPP and how much renewable energy is being used. Of course this is no easy answer to this question, but I tried my best at least for my own server.
Here are my findings and conclusions
Power
Currently my server in the colocation is using about 93W in average with 6c Xeon E5-2630L, 128 GB RAM, 4x 2 TB WD Red + 1 Samsung 960pro NVMe. The server is 7 years old. When I started with that server the power consumption was about 75W, but back then there were far less users on the server. So, 20W more over the past year
Users
I m running my Friendica node on Nerdica.net since 2013. Over the years it became one of the largest Friendica servers in the Fediverse, for some time it was the largest one. It has currently like 700 total users and 180 monthly active users. My Mastodon instance on Nerdculture.de has about 1000 total users and about 300 monthly active users.
Since last year I also run a Matrix-Synapse server. Although I invited my family I m in fact the only active user on that server and have joined some channels.
My XMPP server is even older than my Friendica node. For long time I had like maybe 20 users. Now I setup a new website and added some domains like hookipa.net and xmpp.social the user count increased and currently I have like 130 users on those two domains and maybe like 50 monthly active users. Also note that all my Friendica and Mastodon users can use XMPP with their accounts, but won t be counted the same way as on native users on ejabberd, because the auth backend is different.
So, let s assume I do have like 2000 total users and 500 monthly active users.
CPU, Database Sizes and Disk I/O
Let s have a look about how many resources are being used by those users.
Database Sizes:
- Friendica (MariaDB): 31 GB for 700 users
- Mastodon (PostgreSQL): 15 GB for 1000 users
- Matrix-Synapse (PostgreSQL): 5 GB for 1 user
- XMPP (PostgreSQL): 0.4 GB for 200 users
- Webserver VM (Matrix, Friendica & Mastodon): 13410130 s / 130%
- XMPP VM: 944275 s / 5.4%
- Friendica: 11575 lines
- Matrix: 8174 lines
- Mastodon: 3212 lines