Stellar (XLM) Core Enhancements: Aiming for 5000 TPS with Parallel Processing

The Stellar (XLM) Development Foundation is making strides towards significantly enhancing the transaction processing capabilities of the Stellar network. With the introduction of parallel processing in Stellar Core, the foundation aims to achieve a throughput of 5000 transactions per second (TPS), according to Stellar.

Parallel Processing: The Key to Increased Efficiency

Stellar Core’s new infrastructure focuses on parallelizing transaction dissemination, a component isolated from consensus and execution. This process involves intensive cryptographic tasks such as signature verification and hashing, which are CPU-heavy but independent of the application’s business logic. The decoupled nature of these tasks makes them ideal for parallelization, eliminating risks like data races and deadlocks, thus enhancing performance.

In addition to cryptographic workloads, Stellar Core now performs traffic deduplication in the background, reducing the burden on the main thread and ensuring smoother overall performance. This improvement is illustrated in the performance metrics of Stellar Core version 22.1.0, where a significant reduction in main thread pressure was observed.

New Features and Future Plans

With Stellar Core v22.1.0, the parallel processing capability is enabled by default through a special configuration flag, BACKGROUND_OVERLAY_PROCESSING. This change has led to a noticeable decrease in the backlog of tasks on the main thread, enhancing the efficiency of validators and Horizon instances.

Looking ahead, Stellar Core version 22.3.0 is set to further leverage background processing by executing signature verifications concurrently. This advancement will be facilitated by the EXPERIMENTAL_BACKGROUND_TX_SIG_VERIFICATION flag, allowing the network to handle transactions more efficiently.

These developments are part of the Stellar Development Foundation’s broader strategy to support real-world use cases and meet the evolving demands of the Stellar ecosystem. By optimizing network configurations and pushing the limits of transaction processing, Stellar aims to maintain its competitive edge in the fast-evolving blockchain landscape.

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