Internet Computer performance

This post describes the DFINITY foundation's performance evaluation of the Internet computer. We will periodically update the numbers in this article to reflect improvements we will achieve over time.

Scalability of the Internet Computer comes from partitioning the IC into subnetworks.

Subnetworks process update calls from Ingress messages independently from other subnetworks. They can scale up by adding more subnetworks at the cost of having more network traffic (as applications then need to potentially communicate across subnetworks). In its current form, the IC should be able to scale out to hundreds of subnetworks.

Query calls are read-only calls that are processed locally on each node. Scalability comes from adding more nodes, either to an existing subnetwork (at the cost of making consensus i.e. update calls more expensive) or as new subnetworks.

Test setup

We are running all of our experiments concurrently against all subnetworks other than the NNS and some of the most utilized application subnetworks to avoid disturbance of active IC users. We send load against those subnetworks directly and are not using boundary nodes for those experiments. Boundary nodes have additional rate limiting which is currently set slightly more conservative compared to what the IC can handle and running against them therefore is unsuitable for performance evaluation. We are targeting all nodes in each subnetwork concurrently, much the same as what boundary nodes would be doing if we would use them.

We have installed one counter canister in each subnetwork. This counter canister is essentially a no-op canister. It only maintains a counter, which can be queries via a query call and incremented via update call. The counter value is not using orthogonal persistence, so the overhead for the execution layer of the IC is minimal. Stressing the counter canister can be seen as a way to determine the system overhead or baseline performance.

Measurements

Update calls

The Internet Computer can currently sustain more than 11_000 updates/second for a period of four minutes, with peaks over 11_500 updates/second.

The update calls we have been measuring here are triggered from Ingress messages sent from outside the IC.

Query calls

Arguably more important are query calls, since they contribute with more than 90% of the traffic we are observing on the IC.

The Internet Computer can currently process up to 250,000 queries per second. During our experiments, we increment the load incrementally and run each load for a period of 5 minutes.

Conclusion and next steps

The Internet Computer today already shows impressive performance. On top of that, it should be possible to further scale out the IC by:

• More subnetworks: This will immediate increase the query and update throughput. While adding subnetworks might eventually lead to other scalability problems, the IC in its current shape should be able to support hundreds of subnetworks.
• Performance improvements: Performance can also be improved by better single machine, network and consensus performance tuning. Increasing the performance by at least an order of magnitude should be possible.