Performance and Scalability of Private Ethereum Blockchains

Abstract

Smart contracts provide promising use cases for the public and the private sector by combining cryptographically secure blockchains and the versatility of software. In contrast to public blockchains, private ones can be tailored by configuring blockchain-specific parameters like the time passing between two consecutive blocks, the size of blocks, the hardware of the nodes running the blockchain software, or simply the size of the network. However, the effects of parameters on the performance of private smart contract platforms are not well studied. In this work, we systematically examine to which extent the performance of private Ethereum blockchains scales with various parameters, and which parameters constitute bottlenecks. We introduce a concept for measuring the performance and scalability of private Ethereum smart contract platforms, as well as a framework for the automatic deployment of differently configured private Ethereum blockchains on the cloud. Based on the collected performance-related data, we visualize the impact of parameter changes on performance. Our results show that the effect of variations in one parameter is highly dependent on the configuration of other parameters, especially when running the system near its limits. Moreover, we identify a structure for the bottlenecks of current private Ethereum smart contract platforms.