Let's Imagine Throughput in the Real World

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For example: 

‍Imagine a gas station attendant filling up a car's gas tank using a gas pump.

Let’s also say that it always takes the gas attendant just one minute to fill up any car, no matter how big it is or how low the car's gas tank is.

Let’s call this gas station “Joe’s Gas” and envision that it only has three gas pumps. Naturally, if we have three gas pumps and three cars, it follows that Joe's attendants can only fill up three cars per minute.

So, if we were to fill out a performance report for Joe's gas station, it would show that Joe’s throughput is three cars per minute.

This is Joe’s dilemma: no matter how many cars need gas, the maximum number that can be handled during a specific time frame will always be the same –three.

This is our maximum throughput; it is a fixed upper bound constraint.

As more vehicles enter the gas pump line, they are required to wait, thus creating a queue.

It is the same concept that applies if we are testing a web application.If a web app receives 50 requests per second but can only handle 30transactions per second, the other 20 requests end up waiting in aqueue.

In short, throughput in performance testing is often expressed as transactions per second or TPS.

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Now, let's get back to the crypto space and talk about throughput or TPS. A lot of the blockchains have been recently claiming 100K TPS, 150KTPS etc and so on, claiming themselves to be the fastest blockchain ever. However, we constantly find these claims baseless and not backed by tangible proof.

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We at Apex believe in transparency and backing our claims by actual results. Thereby to confirm our throughput of 150K TPS, we performed a series of performance tests on our Mainnet.

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The table below highlights the different types of tests performed on mainnet Apex to simulate a CRUD operation on a customer i.e. Get, Create, Update and Delete.

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For the different types of tests, we can see the throughout ranging from 36,000 TPS to all the way 1.2 Mil TPS that can be achieved using APEX.

However, the basic rule of thumb is to take +/-50% of the TPS achieved. So in this case around 500K TPS. But given that spawning 5000 NODES is going to be an overkill specially for a new and emerging blockchain, we will consider the rule of thumb to be +-80%, which still takes us to around 240K TPS.

Just to ensure we have encountered external factors such as network latency and other infrastructure related issues, we went even more conservative and stuck with 150K TPS.

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We are extremely confident about these numbers due to:

• Our nodes are spread across the entire world and support on-demand scaling up-to 10000 supporting both Horizontal and Vertical scaling.
• Our nodes are Highly available, Fault Tolerant and Disaster Recovery proof.
• Our nodes support an up-time of 99.999%.
• Our nodes secure both On-chain as well as in-transit communication using Symmetric and Asymmetric keys.

These are some aggressive strategies for a chain that has pledged to be an enterprise grade blockchain in the crypto space. We will continue to improve and ensure we move faster than ever.

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Next time when someone says they are 100K or 150K TPS fast, you know what to look for!

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