I have used Conduit as my homeserver for quite some time because it's extremely light, and synapse is extremely heavy. It's still very early on, but I think this homeserver will become a game changer for the Matrix protocol as it approaches 1.0
I'm running my homeserver on an Intel Atom D2550, and on that hardware synapse pinned the processor core at 100% utilization, but Conduit runs significantly lighter than ejabbered running my XMPP server despite doing quite a bit more.
From his announcement on Matrix:
We have managed to get a lot of features and improvements into this one, here are some of the most exciting ones:
Feature: Support server ACLs !248
Feature: RocksDB Database Backend !217
Feature: Database backend selection at runtime !217
Feature: Report users to homeserver admin !218
Feature: Creation of Spaces (exploring spaces is not supported yet) !220
Feature: Enable voice calls (requires configuring a TURN server) !208
Feature: Lazy loading for much faster initial syncs !240
Improvement: Batch inserts for events !204
Improvement: Significantly faster state resolution !217
Improvement: Reuse reqwest client !265
Docs: Better appservice instructions !196
Fix: Very old events appear in the timeline !188
Fix: Sync not waking up on new events in room !194
Fix: Crash on empty search !286
Fix: Better E2EE support
Fix: Stack overflows