The stories that man could tell, bonus points if he has his dog Gromit with him

I don’t know if there’s any legal implications, but morally it’s pretty abhorrent. The question I’d be asking is would you even want to work for a company that engages in that type of tactic, especially since they’re likely to repeat that kind of nonsense after you’ve started the job.

Really simple

“Bollocks”

You can use old machines for all kinds of servers, I’ve got a stack of old laptops running a Kubernetes cluster, but synapse would push some of them possibly further than they can go so I have it on my more powerful NAS, and even then it isn’t exactly speedy at times

Lots of decent suggestions here so not going to repeat them, but I do have a couple of my own if using synapse:

• have plenty of RAM
• have plenty of CPU
• have plenty of DB storage space
• use Postgres as your database, SQLite sucks

Basically synapse is just a resource hog, and you need to plan for that. The database itself grows quicker than you’d expect as well