Description

In the 24 hours of July 28, Binance Smart Chain (BSC) processed 12.9 million transactions. This number and the below numbers are all from the great BSC network explorer bscscan.com powered by the Etherscan team.

This means 150 transactions per second (TPS) processed on the mainnet, not in isolated environment tests or white paper. If we zoom in, we will also notice that these were not light transactions as BNB or BEP20 transfers, but heavy transactions, as many users were "fighting" each other in the “Play and Earn”, which is majorly contributed by GameFi dApps from MVBII.

The total gas used on July 28 was 2,052,084 million. If all these were for a simple BEP20 transaction that typically cost 50k gas, it could cover 41 millions transactions, and stand for 470 TPS.

On the other hand, with the flood of volume, the network experienced congestion on July 28 for about 4 hours, and many low spec or old version nodes could not catch up with processing blocks in time.

Updates

A new version of beta client is released which has better performance in order to handle the high volume. Please feel free to upgrade and raise bug reports if you encounter any. Please note this is just a beta version, some known bug fix is on the way. Click here to download the beta client.

To improve the performance of nodes and achieve faster block times, we recommend the following specifications.

• validator:
  • 2T GB of free disk space, solid-state drive(SSD), gp3, 8k IOPS, 250MB/S throughput, read latency <1ms.
  • 12 cores of CPU and 48 gigabytes of memory (RAM)
  • m5zn.3xlarge instance type on AWS, or c2-standard-8 on Google cloud.
  • A broadband Internet connection with upload/download speeds of 10 megabyte per second
• fullnode:
  • 1T GB of free disk space, solid-state drive(SSD), gp3, 3k IOPS, 125MB/S throughput, read latency <1ms. (if start with snap/fast sync, it will need NVMe SSD)
  • 8 cores of CPU and 32 gigabytes of memory (RAM).
  • c5.4xlarge instance type on AWS, c2-standard-8 on Google cloud.
  • A broadband Internet connection with upload/download speeds of 5 megabyte per second

If you don’t need an archive node, choose the latest snapshot and rerun from scratch from there.

Problems

• Fast/snap sync mode cannot catch up with the current state data.
• Full sync cannot catch up with the current block.
• High CPU usage.

Suggestions

• Use the latest released binary version.
• Don't use fast/snap sync for now, use the snapshot we provide to run full sync.
• Confirm your hardware is sufficient, you can refer to our official documents (we will update if there are new discoveries).
• Regularly prune data to reduce disk pressure.
• Make sure the peer you connect to is not too slow.

Reference PRs

• performance improvement in many aspects #257
• [R4R]fix: block fetcher efficiency #333

We will update this board, If there are any updates.
If you have a suggestion or want to propose some improvements, please visit our Github.
If you encounter any synchronization issues, please report them here.