We all know that the Ethereum network has undergone many major network upgrades since genesis and will undergo many more into the future. Though there’s so much more that goes into core client development than just coding up the new features for network upgrades - namely, optimization and maintenance are two very big areas that core developers spend most of their time working on - and for very good reasons.

Péter Szilágyi (karalabe.eth) @peter_szilagyi

Upcoming work of @Gary_Rong 🤯 - 27% faster snap sync - 75% less db read, 50% less write during sync - 15% smaller db size (ignoring ancients) - 30% faster block processing after snap sync * Numbers not final ** Will ship in months *** Drops serving fast sync #golang #Ethereum

December 7th 2021

32 Retweets270 Likes

You can see in Peter’s tweet above just how significant the improvements to clients can be from much faster sync times to a smaller disk footprint - all of this makes it easier and more efficient to run an Ethereum full node (which allows for greater decentralization and security). Another great thing about these optimizations is that they do not require a network upgrade/hard fork to implement and it’s up to the user if they want to run the newer versions or stick to the old ones (though in the event of a network upgrade or critical client bug users still need to upgrade to the latest clients, of course).

There are other material benefits that come with better and more efficient clients too from an overall healthier and more secure network to allowing for future functionality to be built-in safely. One benefit that regular end-users will feel from time to time is when the gas limit is raised because it has become safe to do so without compromising network health or decentralization. This leads to a short-term boost in throughput for the chain though this extra capacity does tend to get filled up quite quickly (more on the gas limit here).

Layer 1 clients aren’t the only pieces of core software in the Ethereum ecosystem that benefit greatly from optimizations - layer 2’s do as well and, while they’re in their beta stage, can move much more quickly to deploy optimizations alongside their own “hard forks”. We’ve already seen Optimistic Ethereum upgrade to ‘OVM 2.0’, Arbitrum will be upgrading to ‘Nitro’ very soon and a bunch of the other layer 2’s are always optimizing their client software to get more juice out of it. This will become especially important when these layer 2’s decide to decentralize both the sequencing and validating of transactions/blocks because the software will then be run on all different types of hardware and in many different geographical locations.

Of course, software optimizations go far beyond just the core Ethereum clients and aren’t anything new or unique to crypto but it’s always interesting to watch the core developers hard at work getting as much juice out of the software as they can. After all, requiring beefier hardware to run Ethereum is not really an option because we want to preserve decentralization - so the focus is always on upgrading and optimizing the software.

Have a great day everyone,
Anthony Sassano

Enjoyed today’s piece? I send out a fresh one every week day - be sure to subscribe to receive it in your inbox!

Join the Daily Gwei Ecosystem

• Twitter

• YouTube

• Discord

All information presented above is for educational purposes only and should not be taken as investment advice.