disable federation if sqlite is used

[uhoreg]

unless the admin set a yes_i_want_my_server_to_catch_on_fire option. This preserves the ability to get something up and running for testing, but reduce the surprise of peoples' servers melting when joining a large federated room like HQ. Of course, there will need to be a big warning somewhere so that people know that federation is disabled.

[neilisfragile]

Agreed on need for big warning - we'll be revamping our docs and onboarding rsn so I would see this as a good thing to include.

(Not really docs, but tagging since it would need clear doc'ing)

[ShellCode33]

This feature would be great even if using postgresql ! I love Synapse and the Matrix environment, but I don't have a big server and being able to disable federation just in order to be able to chat with my friends on my private homeserver would be wonderful ! Synapse is regularly killed by the OOM Killer because of its RAM consumption and having to restart it every two or three days is a real PITA...

[ara4n]

disabling federation in general landed on develop a few weeks ago and will be in synapse 0.27

[krombel]

Just as a reference: #2619

// EDIT as question got answered in the meantime

[ara4n]

see also #2889

[ara4n]

bumping priority as more and more people are getting a horrible experience due to this :(

[neilisfragile]

The problem with disabling/refusing to federate large rooms is that we end up breaking sytest and existing deployments. So conclusion is that we will

• Investigate sqlite regressions to see if anything obvious exists
• Add a health warning logs on synctl start up
• Make set up guide default to postgres and extract installation notes into it's own page