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+{% extends "common/news.j2" %} {% block body_content %}
+
+<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>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 iden-
+tifying improvement opportunities therein to analyze and improve performance. While the
+basic framework was already known from the previous study, this work focuses on extend-
+ing 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 bot-
+tleneck. 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 pro-
+cessing 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 Curren-
+cies based on Taler would require only a few exchanges per continent.
+</p>
+<h4>Download links</h4>
+<ul>
+ <li><a href="/papers/boss2022thesis.pdf">PDF (English)</a></li>
+</ul>
+
+{% endblock body_content %}