It's not bad, and I use it/like it, but it's also exceedingly heavy compared to IRC. If you want to join large rooms, your server really needs a couple gig of RAM, and the "full featured" client (Element) is an Electron mess that uses an awful lot of RAM. A freshly launched Element connected to my server is idling with 200MB of RAM used, and it'll go up from there.
Yep, I completely agree with you on that. Making the client in Electron is somewhat understandable given the effort it would take to maintain a client for every platform, but synapse is really heavy. Synapse's heavy resource usage is one of the many issues the second-generation server - Dendrite - is intended to solve, but it seems like it's still likely a year or so out from being production ready.
