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To boost a client's performance, it's essential to collect metrics, evaluate the existing state, and then plan enhancements based on these insights. Extra data is also needed to identify which parts of the code consume the most time during the program's execution. Besu offers a plethora of metrics covering different facets of the execution layer, including block processing (newPayload calls), p2p, RPC, the transaction pool, syncing, the database layer (RocksDB), among others. These metrics can be gathered or extracted by any monitoring system like Prometheus and can be displayed using a visualization tool such as Grafana with the existing Besu Full dashboard.
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Since the merge in September 2022, we've been committed to improving Besu's block processing performance, following a significant number of user reports about missing attestations on their validators. We've succeeded in boosting the performance by three times, lowering the median time from 1.71 seconds to 0.57 seconds on the m6a.xlarge AWS VM, and the 95th percentile from 2.98 seconds to 0.98 seconds. It's important to note that the m6a.xlarge AWS instance comes with 4vCPU, 16 GiB, and lacks NVMe. Most of the improvements have been made specifically to the Bonsai data layer implementation. If you're using Besu with Forest and experiencing performance problems, we suggest switching to Bonsai.
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One of the biggest improvements on SLOAD operation was the implementation of the healing mechanism of the Bonsai flat database on accounts and storage. Bonsai is a feature in the Besu Ethereum client that operates with both a flat database and a trie structure simultaneously. This unique combination allows for faster and more efficient SLOAD operations.
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We also focused on fine-tuning RocksDB by activating the bloom filters. When a read request comes in, RocksDB uses the Bloom filter to check if the key is present in an SST (Sorted String Table) file without having to scan the entire file, this helps to speed up read operations. Additionally, we introduced a new flag for high-spec machines (with RAM > 16 GiB) to utilize more block cache, thereby reducing IO activity during SLOAD. The high spec flag can be enabled with this Besu option --Xplugin-rocksdb-high-spec-enabled.
Besu has also benefited from the updates and releases of RocksDB, which have led to enhancements in performance.
SSTORE operation improvements
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