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Big Block Propagation�And�Organic Big Blocks

Csaba Kiraly, Leonardo Bautista-Gomez

Ethereum Foundation Grant

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Big Block Propagation�On Mainnet

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The EF Big Block Experiment

  • EF testing the capacity of Ethereum mainnet to process large blocks
  • Large transactions submitted -> large blocks -> finalized

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  • Metrics (including block propagation latency) collected in Sentry nodes
    • 3 geographic locations; running all 5 CL clients; a few nodes for each
  • Metrics collected per Client Implementation … with different semantics

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Block Propagation Latency

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Increases with block size

Considering only blocks between 64-128KB, 80% arrives before 2 seconds from slot start

4 seconds limit

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Different CL client results (really, or just semantics?)

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Different CL client results (really, or just semantics?)

Timestamp semantics:

  • On receive or after processing?
  • Low-prio reporting thread?

UPDATE: in this plot the timestamp shown is:�- AFTER validation�- AFTER block added to DAG

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Organic Big Blocks�On Mainnet

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Organic Big Blocks ( > 250KB)

  • From 2023/03/01 to 2023/08/31 (6 months of data)
  • A total of 1,323,034 slots (From slot 5,900,965 to 7,223,999)
  • A total of 109,504 big blocks (8.2%)
  • The biggest block is 2,325,175 bytes in size at slot 7,155,461 (Aug-22)

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Organic Big Blocks ( > 250KB)

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Organic Big Blocks ( > 250KB)

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Organic Big Blocks ( > 250KB)

~2 seconds

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Resources

Big Block Experiment

Organic Big Blocks