Stress Tests

It was promised earlier that Zold cryptocurrency is way faster than any other Blockchain-based solution can even dream of. We claimed that a million transactions per second is not the limit. Theoretically it’s true, because there is no centralized ledger in Zold. Each node maintains its own list of wallets. Thus, the bigger the number of nodes, the faster the network. We created a simple tool to prove our claims.

It’s an open source command line Ruby gem called zold-stress, which you install just like you install zold:

$ gem install zold-stress

Then, you create a directory and pull a wallet there, with some ZLD on board. It has to be your wallet, obviously. And you have to have a private key for it:

$ mkdir stress
$ cd stress
$ zold pull 2deb903f1fa1ea68

Then, you run zold-stress:

$ zold-stress --rounds=4 --batch=16 --pool=8 --threads=8

Run it and see what happens. If it doesn’t work and you see a stacktrace, submit it to the GitHub repo, we will take a look. However, I’m pretty sure it will work and you will see something similar to this output:

This video actually demonstrates a stress test of a demo network, not a real one. There are eight nodes and they are all hosted locally. The test is running from my laptop. It doesn’t show a million transactions per second, but.

The arguments of the tool mean the following:

• --batch: the number of transactions to send in each round;
• --rounds: the number of rounds;
• --threads: the number of parallel threads to use;
• --pool: the number of wallets to send payments from.

The next step for us is to grow the network up to 300+ nodes and run the same test from multiple entry points. The goal is to demonstrate the speed of 10,000 tps.