taler-www

2022-06.html.j2 (2839B)

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 <h1>2022-6: &quot;GNU Taler Scalability: Measuring and Improving the Performance of GNU Taler on Grid’5000&quot;</h1>
 
 <h2>Background</h2>
 <p>
 Anonymity loves company. Hence, to provide the best
 possible anonymity to GNU Taler users, the scalability of
 individual installations of a Taler payment service matters.
 While our design scales nicely on paper,
 <a href="https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/fed4fire/">NGI Fed4Fire+</a>
 enabled us to evaluate the transaction rates that could be achieved
 with the actual implementation.  Experiments were conducted by Marco Boss for
 his Bachelor's thesis at the <a href="https://www.bfh.ch/">Bern
 University of Applied Sciences</a> to assess bottlenecks and suggest
 avenues for further improvement.
 </p>
 <h2>Introduction video</h2>
 <p>
   <video id="video" poster="/images/logo-2021.svg" autobuffer="" height="360" width="640" controls="controls">
     <source src="/videos/mboss2022video.mp4" type="video/mp4" \>
   </video>
 </p>
 <h2>Abstract</h2>
 <p>
 This thesis is on the GNU Taler scalability experiments conducted
 on <a href="https://www.grid5000.fr/">Grid’5000</a> in the first
 half of 2022, which was preceded by preparations carried out in the second half of 2021
 supported by the Next Generation Internet initiative’s
 <a href="https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/fed4fire/">NGI Fed4Fire+</a> program.
 <br>
 The primary goal of this study was to evaluate the scalability of GNU Taler in a real-world
 scenario. That is, moving away from the loopback system to a distributed network and identifying
 improvement opportunities therein to analyze and improve performance. While the
 basic framework was already known from the previous study, this work focuses on extending
 the framework and making further improvements to GNU Taler. This includes, among
 other things, the horizontal distribution of the PostgreSQL database.
 <br>
 We identified and fixed several bottlenecks in the GNU Taler software. We parallelized the
 execution of the cryptographic frontend, leaving the PostgreSQL database as the natural bottleneck.
 Here, we optimized queries and modified the schema to enable table partitioning.
 The scalability demonstrated in our experiments shows that Taler is very capable of processing
 enough transactions per second to be considered an acceptable payment system.
 Throughout this work, we were able to increase the performance of Taler by a factor of 95,
 from about 300 to 28.5k transactions per second, showing that Central Bank Digital Currencies
 based on Taler would require only a few exchanges per continent.
 </p>
 <h2>Download links</h2>
 <ul>
  <li><a href="/presentations/boss2022poster.pdf">Poster PDF (English)</a></li>
  <li><a href="/papers/boss2022thesis.pdf">Thesis PDF (English)</a></li>
 </ul>
 
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