3 posts tagged with "high-throughput"

This week, the Leios team achieved significant milestones in protocol development and analysis, successfully demonstrating high-throughput capabilities and exploring new protocol variants. The team conducted comprehensive experiments with the Stracciatella variant, analyzed the Linear Leios throughput efficiency, and implemented new simulation capabilities.

High-throughput demonstration​

• Completed experiments demonstrating over 1,000 TPS capability with the Stracciatella variant of Leios
• Achieved spatial efficiency above 95% with transaction lifecycle times under two minutes
• Validated protocol performance under extreme throughput conditions well beyond the current Cardano capacity
• Documented detailed findings in the Stracciatella analysis notebook.

Protocol variants analysis​

Stracciatella variant​

• Completed a comprehensive analysis of the Stracciatella variant (no IBs, transaction references in EBs, two-stage pipeline)
• Key findings:
  • 5-slot/stage performs less well but scales better than 8-slot/stage
  • Only a minimal fraction of transactions fail to reach the ledger, likely due to EB expiration
  • Network usage is slightly heavy, while CPU usage appears suspiciously light
  • Congestion begins to appear at throughput levels above 1,000 TPS.

Linear Leios throughput efficiency​

• Conducted an analysis of the Linear Leios variant's probability of including certified EBs on-chain
• Results show Linear Leios could achieve approximately 500 times the throughput of Praos at over 50% network resource efficiency
• 500 times Praos throughput would exceed 1,000 historically typical transactions per second
• Generated comprehensive throughput and efficiency visualizations available in the analysis repository.

CDDL specifications​

• Added CDDL specifications for Linear and Stracciatella protocol variants.

Simulation improvements​

Rust simulation​

• Implemented a first pass of the Linear Leios variant in the Rust simulation
• Enhanced simulation capabilities to support protocol variant testing and analysis
• Continued optimizing simulation performance for high-throughput scenarios.

Small transaction experiments​

• Completed the analysis of small-transaction, high-throughput experiments with 300-byte non-Plutus transactions
• Key findings:
  • 1,000 tx/s with 300 B/tx is feasible in Leios variants
  • Clear time–space tradeoff between variants
  • full-with-ib-references uses space more efficiently than full-without-ibs
  • full-without-ibs has a shorter transaction lifecycle than full-with-ib-references
  • 2 CPU cores are sufficient for high-throughput operation
  • Network usage remains modest under high load
• Supporting materials are available in analysis documentation and analysis notebook.

Next steps​

• Continue investigation of protocol variants for CIP convergence
• Expand simulation capabilities for additional protocol variants
• Refine performance optimization strategies for high-throughput scenarios
• Complete documentation of protocol variant comparisons and recommendations.

This week, the Leios team achieved a significant milestone by successfully demonstrating protocol viability at 1,000 TPS. They also completed a comprehensive attack surface analysis and made substantial improvements to simulation and verification tools.

High-throughput demonstration​

• Successfully completed a 1,000 TPS experiment using basic 300-byte non-Plutus transactions
• Demonstrated the viability of Leios protocol operation at extremely high throughput levels
• Validated protocol performance under stress conditions significantly beyond current Cardano capacity
• Documented detailed findings in the 1,000 TPS analysis.

Security analysis​

• Completed a comprehensive attack surface analysis for the second technical report
• Defined terminology and taxonomy for potential Leios attack vectors
• Categorized major attack types and their potential impacts on protocol security
• Enhanced understanding of protocol vulnerabilities and mitigation strategies.

Rust simulation enhancements​

• Finished implementing support for input block (IB) equivocations in the simulation
• Added capability to model and analyze protocol behavior under adversarial conditions
• Enhanced simulation fidelity for security-related protocol testing.

Trace verifier performance optimization​

• Achieved 3x performance improvement by configuring minimum heap size to 1GB
• Reduced garbage collection overhead from 75% to 2% of execution time
• Enhanced profiling capabilities with detailed performance analysis tools
• Improved verification efficiency for large-scale simulation trace analysis.

Protocol convergence for CIP​

• Intensified efforts to converge on a specific Leios variant for the Cardano Improvement Proposal (CIP)
• Applied systematic evaluation methodology to rank protocol candidates from multiple angles
• Evaluated efficiency metrics, including temporal efficiency versus storage optimization trade-offs
• Assessed attack surface and security vectors across different protocol variants
• Analyzed utility factors, including quality of service, developer friendliness, user experience, and downstream ecosystem impacts
• Focused on eliminating candidates through evidence-based assessment of valuable protocol characteristics.

This week, the team focused on simulation analysis, security improvements, and protocol documentation, making significant progress across multiple areas.

Simulation analysis and performance​

The team executed the first high-throughput simulations of Leios using the Rust simulator, with transaction rates reaching up to 1,000 TPS. They introduced two key efficiency metrics to quantify system performance:

• Temporal efficiency, which measures the fraction of submitted transactions that make it into the ledger, with nearly 100% indicating optimal transaction inclusion
• Spatial efficiency, which represents the ratio of transaction size to total ledger size (including IBs, EBs, and RBs), with higher values indicating better storage optimization.

Recent revisions to Full Short Leios have shown promising improvements in both efficiency metrics. The simulations revealed an average transaction lifecycle of approximately 100 seconds from submission to ledger inclusion.

The analysis produced several key visualizations that demonstrate the system's performance:

Protocol documentation and analysis​

The team conducted an extensive analysis of transaction throughput and block characteristics, producing several key visualizations:

The team also completed a comprehensive profitability analysis for Leios SPOs, considering various deployment scenarios:

• Evaluated infrastructure costs across premium and value cloud providers
• Demonstrated profitability without reserve contributions at 50+ TPS
• Documented the impact of diminishing future rewards due to reserve depletion
• Analyzed comparative economics between Praos and Leios SPOs.

Security and infrastructure improvements​

The team addressed several security vulnerabilities in web applications through a series of patches:

• Fixed minor and moderate security issues in #321, #322, #323, and #325 pull requests.

Protocol enhancements​

Recent protocol improvements include:

• Implementation of revisions to Full Short Leios design to enhance both temporal and spatial efficiency
• Optimization of protocol parameters for improved transaction processing
• Development of a new sharding strategy in Rust simulation
• Enhanced logging system for tracking spatial efficiency metrics.

For more detailed information about the simulations and analysis, please refer to the analysis documentation and the profitability analysis notebook.