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A performance evaluation of modular functions and state databases for Hyperledger Fabric blockchain systems

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Abstract

The performance of blockchains is a critical issue in various applications, such as digital currency transactions and balance checking. Blockchain system architectures such as the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain system (HFBS) have decentralized modular functions, where each module runs on an independent set of hosts. This study conducts a series of experiments to understand the performance limitations of each modular operation in a blockchain system architecture. Three studies involving software programs installed on cloud computing platforms are conducted to evaluate the transaction processing bottleneck. We present an improved modular configuration to enhance the cost efficiency of consortium blockchain systems. Although the CLI module consumes the largest processing resource, the scaled features make the traffic load distributed. The endorsing module is actually bottleneck due to inextensibility and state database. Experimental results obtained from the state database and system performance evaluation indicate that the performance of the state database is highly related to the read-type transactions of the HFBS but not to the write-type transactions. We argue that the performance bottleneck of read operations can be attributed to the fact that CouchDB cannot achieve high system performance under a large number of query operations. When querying the internal text in CouchDB, the system scans the entire data table. Thus, performance and scalability bottlenecks occur for CouchDB. Accordingly, we propose the adoption of MySQL Document Store, which uses a binary storage format similar to that of the state database of HFBS. The experimental results confirm that MySQL Document Store outperforms CouchDB and native state database. The consequent increase in the operational efficiency of the state database enhanced the operational performance of the HFBS. The practical contribution of this study is that its findings can serve as a reference for system structure design for developers and indicate suitable strategies that can be deployed by developers in blockchain systems.

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Availability of data and materials

The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available in the cloud storage https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/19AIEig6gl_2DnufX0NqCEVSgsfR-bIvc?usp=sharing.

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Funding

This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST), Taiwan, under Grant MOST 111-2410-H-305-023- and National Taipei University, Taiwan, under Grant 2022-NTPU-ORDA-02.

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  1. Graduate Institute of Information Management, National Taipei University, New Taipei City, Taiwan, ROC

    Yean-Fu Wen & Chen-Min Hsu

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  1. Yean-Fu Wen
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Correspondence to Yean-Fu Wen.

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Wen, YF., Hsu, CM. A performance evaluation of modular functions and state databases for Hyperledger Fabric blockchain systems. J Supercomput 79, 2654–2690 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-022-04762-3

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