L2 load-tests

Testing

Load tests are available via L2 CLI and Makefile targets.

Makefile

There are currently three different load tests you can run:

make load-test
make load-test-erc20
make load-test-fibonacci
make load-test-io

The first one sends regular transfers between accounts, the second runs an EVM-heavy contract that computes fibonacci numbers, the third a heavy IO contract that writes to 100 storage slots per transaction.

Load test comparison against Reth

To run a load test on Reth, clone the repo, then run

cargo run --release -- node --chain <path_to_genesis-load-test.json> --dev --dev.block-time 5000ms --http.port 1729

to spin up a reth node in dev mode that will produce a block every 5 seconds.

Reth has a default mempool size of 10k transactions. If the load test goes too fast it will reach the limit; if you want to increase mempool limits pass the following flags:

--txpool.max-pending-txns 100000000 --txpool.max-new-txns 1000000000 --txpool.pending-max-count 100000000 --txpool.pending-max-size 10000000000 --txpool.basefee-max-count 100000000000 --txpool.basefee-max-size 1000000000000 --txpool.queued-max-count 1000000000

Changing block gas limit

By default the block gas limit is the one Ethereum mainnet uses, i.e. 30 million gas. If you wish to change it, just edit the gasLimit field in the genesis file (in the case of ethrex it's genesis-l2.json, in the case of reth it's genesis-load-test.json). Note that the number has to be passed as a hextstring.

Flamegraphs

To analyze performance during load tests (both ethrex and reth) you can use cargo flamegraph to generate a flamegraph of the node.

For ethrex, you can run the server with:

sudo -E CARGO_PROFILE_RELEASE_DEBUG=true cargo flamegraph --bin ethrex --features dev --root -- --network test_data/genesis-l2.json --http.port 1729 --dev

For reth:

sudo cargo flamegraph --profile profiling -- node --chain <path_to_genesis-load-test.json> --dev --dev.block-time 5000ms --http.port 1729

With Make Targets

There are some make targets inside the root's Makefile.

You will need two terminals:

make start-node-with-flamegraph → This starts the ethrex client.
make flamegraph → This starts a script that sends a bunch of transactions, the script will stop ethrex when the account reaches a certain balance.

Samply

To run with samply, run

samply record ./target/profiling/reth node --chain ../ethrex/test_data/genesis-load-test.json --dev --dev.block-time 5000ms --http.port 1729

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Ethrex