TL;DR: Developer Jonathan Toomim posted video demonstration of his project involving a Bitcoin Cash (BCH) stress test, showing what kind of transaction throughput is possible. Using the stock code available, he ran it on a fairly standard desktop computer. While preliminary, the results are promising, as Toomin revealed 3,000 transactions per second in about 8 minutes.

Bitcoin Cash Community Abuzz: 3,000 TX/PS Stress Test

“I built a benchmark,” Toomim explained, “to measure how much transaction throughput Bitcoin ABC can get and to find trouble spots in the code that need optimization. Here are some early test results from a 4-node regtest network running on one 4-core desktop computer. This test generates 672,000 transactions and mines them into blocks in about 9 minutes.”

Twelve gigs of RAM, a quad-core, 8 thread CPU comprised components of his desktop computer, which Toomim described as “medium/high end, about, like, $250 for the CPU itself; nothing too exotic.” He ran 4 nodes on his single computer (1 core per node), connected in a chain, noting transactions will have to pass through them all. Three of the nodes generated spam, while one the actual blocks.

Toomim is probably best known more recently for his work on the block propagation tool, Xthinner. By early April of this year, Xthinner was working with BCH mainnet blocks, yielding 99.54% compression. For the stress test, however, Toomim did not apply Xthinner, making his 3K tx/ps results even more impressive. “For reference,” he noted, “BTC is limited to about 4 transactions per second, and mines about 350,000 transactions per day.”

The BCH community was abuzz at Toomim’s findings. “Great video,” a popular subreddit comment gushed, “impressive numbers considering each node basically had just one core to itself (ie. not using the multi-processing capabilities).” Another commenter reminded, “It conclusively shows the hardware bottleneck for nodes is actually even significantly higher than we assumed at the beginning when you add just standard multicore systems and sensible parallelization and locking strategies on a per node basis, and the software is advanced enough to practically demonstrate this. 3tx/sec on core to > ~3x the initial 1,200tx/sec Satoshi estimates on scale predicated upon 2008 visa traffic is one hell of a leap and really drives home with practical evidence just how stupid the [Bitcoin Core] position has been all along.”

DISCLOSURE: The author holds cryptocurrency as part of his financial portfolio, including BCH.

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