This document attempts to capture and discuss some of the areas of Tendermint that seem to be cited as causing performance issue. I'm hoping to continue to gather feedback and input on this document to better understand what issues Tendermint performance may cause for our users.
The overall goal of this document is to allow the maintainers and community to get a better sense of these issues and to be more capably able to discuss them and weight trade-offs about any proposed performance-focused changes. This document does not aim to propose any performance improvements. It does suggest useful places for benchmarks and places where additional metrics would be useful for diagnosing and further understanding Tendermint performance.
Please comment with areas where my reasoning seems off or with additional areas that Tendermint performance may be causing user pain.
Communication in Tendermint among consensus nodes, applications, and operator
tools all use different message formats and transport mechanisms. In some
cases there are multiple options. Having all these options complicates both the
code and the developer experience, and hides bugs. To support a more robust,
trustworthy, and usable system, we should document which communication paths
are essential, which could be removed or reduced in scope, and what we can
improve for the most important use cases.
This document proposes a variety of possible improvements of varying size and
scope. Specific design proposals should get their own documentation.
This ADR restores a variation of the old Request for Comments documentation
that we previously used. The proposal differs from the original formulation,
and does not replace ADRs.
Per conversations earlier today, we'll consider all proposed implementation changes part of the ADR process rather than the RFC process (which will remain, for now, on the spec; this may get incorporated instead into the burgeoning "CIPS" process).
This change renames RFC 1 to ADR 66, leaving space for the not-yet-merged ADR 65.
Sam Kleinman
William Banfield
M. J. Fromberger
Tess Rinearson
Marko