Lockless Transaction Isolation in Hyperledger Fabric

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lock-free transaction isolation method for Hyperledger Fabric that leverages existing versioning to significantly improve performance while maintaining isolation guarantees.

Contribution

It proposes a novel version-based snapshot isolation technique that eliminates locking, enhancing throughput in Hyperledger Fabric's distributed blockchain system.

Findings

Achieves 8.1x performance improvement over current locking approach

Comparable performance to an ideal no-isolation baseline

Successfully implements and evaluates the lock-free isolation method

Abstract

Hyperledger Fabric is a distributed operating system for permissioned blockchains hosted by the Linux Foundation. It is the first truly extensible blockchain system for running distributed applications at enterprise grade scale. To achieve this, Hyperledger Fabric introduces a novel execute-order-validate blockchain architecture, allowing parallelization of transaction execution and validation. However, this raises the need for transaction isolation. Today transaction isolation is attained by locking the entire state database during simulation of transactions and database updates. This lock is one of the major performance bottlenecks as observed by previous work. This work presents a new lock-free approach for providing transaction isolation. It harnesses the already existing versioning of key-value pairs in the database, used primarily for a read-write conflict detection during the validation phase, to create a version-based snapshot isolation. We further implement and evaluate our new approach. We show that our solution outperforms the current implementation by 8.1x and that it is comparable to the optimal solution where no isolation mechanism is applied.