Performance comparison between serialization and deserialization libraries for the Solana Gossip Protocol.
The Solana Blockchain is one of the most popular blockchains in the world. Its success is mainly due to its speed, with approximately 3,400 transactions per second, compared to 15 transactions per second for Ethereum, making Solana one of the fastest blockchain networks currently available.
The Gossip Service is the base-ground of the entire network. Every tenth of a second each network’s Node share signed data objects among themselves in order to manage a cluster. The validator's services listener configuration, contract information, ledger height and vote are some example of exchanged data.
In the last weeks, in my spare time, I have been working on this project Solana Gossip TUI and today Sunday 23 April 2023 searching for comparisons between serialization and deserialization libraries, I came across the following repo rust_serialization_benchmark.
At this point a question came to my mind: is there another library than the one used by Solana Gossip Service that could improve its performance?
The Solana Gossip Service currently use bincode and this are the other I want to give a try.
| Library | Crate |
|---|---|
| serde_son | 🎯 |
| bincode | 🎯 |
| alkahest | 🎯 |
| rkyv | 🎯 |
⚠️ This project is deeply inspired by the rust_serialization_benchmark project. Thanks djkoloski for your work!!! ⚠️
cargo bench
| Library | Serialize | Deserialize |
|---|---|---|
| serde_son | 548.98 ns | 1016.20 ns |
| bincode | 202.46 ns | 63.98 ns |
| alkahest | 66.48 ns | 35.08 ns |
| rkyv | 6.94 ns | 26.75 ns |
| rkyv unsafe | 24.36 ns |
| Library | Serialize | Deserialize |
|---|---|---|
| serde_son | 564.49 ns | 1016.20 ns |
| bincode | 203.54 ns | 64.21 ns |
| alkahest | 67.06 ns | 35.48 ns |
| rkyv | 7.04 ns | 26.78 ns |
| rkyv unsafe | 24.379 ns |
| Library | Serialize | Deserialize |
|---|---|---|
| serde_son | 1442.40 ns | 2589.80 ns |
| bincode | 355.79 ns | 171.78 ns |
| alkahest | 152.75 ns | 146.57 ns |
| rkyv | 34.47 ns | 62.15 ns |
| rkyv unsafe | 53.45 ns |
| Library | Serialize | Deserialize |
|---|---|---|
| serde_son | 10831.00 ns | 23099.00 ns |
| bincode | 3649.90 ns | 3284.20 ns |
| alkahest | 3075.60 ns | 3280.10 ns |
| rkyv | 816.79 ns | 2106.40 ns |
| rkyv unsafe | 1982.70 ns |
As it is easy to understand there are tangible benefits in terms of performance to use different libraries. In particular the rkyv library seems to give the greatest tangible improvement.
This wasn't meant to be a rigorous test, but rather an answer to my curiosity.
To make use of all these serialization libraries, some of the types used in the protocol structures have been implemented in a dummy way, just paying attention to respect the size of the underlying serialized values.
So for example the std::net::SocketAddr has been replaced with
pub struct SocketAddr {
ip: [u8; 4],
port: u16,
}or the bv::BitVec has been replaced with
pub struct BitVec<Block> {
bits: Option<Block>,
len: u64,
}In this way, besides being able to make the test work, it was also possible to avoid external dependencies.
--
Copyright 2023 Luca Ceppelli
Licensed under the MIT license <LICENSE-MIT or https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT>. Files in the project may not be copied, modified, or distributed except according to those terms.