As others said, Synapse can sometimes be very resource-hungry. It might be worth giving a try to Conduit and Dendrite, which are alternative Matrix server implementations and especially Conduit seems to be focused to by lightweight. Although I do not have any personal experience with them and it seems that they are most likely a lot less mature than Synapse at the moment.
Sorry, can't resist: it would not be 6.5 % of Linux users, it would be 6.5 % overall. That would mean about 54.8 % of Linux users.