2018-11-14 meeting notes: calculating comm events to manage expectations about performance

Date

Attendees

Goals

We need a clear decision on the definition of a comm event and comm event goals for Mercury.

Recording

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1FcT2bqWhDWB-JM5TLvhQ6-h7gS6TVCzg

Discussion items

ItemNotes
Resources
Questions
  • What is the definition of a COMM event? 
  • Based on this definition, what are the goals for Mercury?
Definitions
  • COMM event is exactly when a deployed output meets a deployed for comprehension. This does not include joins. There has been confusion about how to count joins because they are not primitives. However, joins are not comm events. Contracts with joins will not achieve the maximum throughput.
  • Size is the size of a deployed data value. It's a java data type that can be measured in bytes
  • Transactions (computing world) vs financial transactions (00:37)
    • TXN - transactions with notions of 
    • Fin TXN - notions of transfer of value. Token.
      • How many Fin TXN given a wallet
Illustration

Scope on size of the data we're willing to count as a COMM event
  • If we have no bound on size, there is no way to have a bound on COMM events/second.
  • IDEA make it a function and take an average of the size of the COMM event for a particular domain
    • COMM event as a function of the size. When the COMM events are of a given size and returns, then provide a calculation of COMM event/second.
    • This function can largely be empirical based on existing performance
      • How to find - Set up a suite of tests to do basic curve fitting to find a function that fits the curve. 
    • Domain
Domains
  • Idea that we could get this information from the portfolio companies
  • Goal to understand based on industry what the needs or expectations for data processing and costs
    • Ned working to collect information from portfolio companies
  • This is a nice to have. Not a Mercury requirement.
  • Given a wallet implementation and based on our measurement of COMM events/second, you can get an understand of expected performance
Current reporting
  • Need to update current tools for size
    • IDEA this could be done in reporting and refining Grafana
  • Dev team will report on performance as a function of a COMM event related to size so when we plug in a function of a data transaction common to a financial transaction we can show performance for that domain.
    • What value should we assume for now? We should test for a variety of sizes to look for cliffs where performance. changes.
Next steps

Action items