ELI5: How fast is the Internet Computer?

2021-11-05T13:53:04Z

Jdobbs: Adding TPS as a measurement for section 3

The most helpful way to way to answer this question is by choosing a vantage point.

==1. From the point of view of an app user (what kind of dapps are possible) ==

From the point of view of a user of a dapp, the IC is "fast" enough that app consumers would have no idea that it runs with a blockchain under the hood (or Azure or IBM or AWS). It would be comparable to centralized compute providers. This means that while it would be extremely tricky to "build an Airbnb web app on (traditional) smart contracts" because of the slow user experience, developers can create "Airbnb web app on the Internet Computer".

That is how apps like OpenChat (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjMIY2w480I), LinkedUp, Distrikt can provide a good user experience.

==2. From the point of view of a dapp developer (latency of calls) ==

There will be two relevant factors:

a. How fast can an app READ data from a backend on the IC - Apps can make query calls to canisters (which hold state) so it can read data in less than a second ('''targeting under 200 milliseconds, and regularly hit under 250 milliseconds''').

b. How fast can an app WRITE data to a backend on the IC - Apps can make UPDATE calls. These go through consensus so they take more time. '''Target is 2 seconds''' currently (with constant work to decrease that further). Compared to BTC or ETH, this is orders of magnitude faster. Compared to centralized compute, this MAY seem slow at first, but actually, if you take into account the amount of replication across servers in most stacks, it is par for the course.

Yes, currently, canisters are single-threaded... but as Dom has mentioned at events, we are working on that too.

== 3. From the POV of blockchain measurements (Blocks per second & Transactions per secons) ==

The IC is "unbounded" which means that, unlike most other protocols, it can add throughput by adding more machines. To double the calls per second... we would just add more subnets. This is a key point in what we mean by the IC being "unbounded." At the time of this writing, it is processing '''25 blocks per second''': https://dashboard.internetcomputer.org/

In a recent test of the IC's throughput capacity the network clocked 300,000 (TPS) transactions per second. For comparison, Visa's payment is capable of processing 24,000 to 56,000 payment transactions per second.

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ELI5: How fast is the Internet Computer?