Resource Analysis of Ethereum 2.0 Clients

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the resource consumption and performance differences of various Ethereum 2.0 clients during protocol implementation, highlighting network perturbations and client reactions to scalability challenges.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of Ethereum 2.0 clients' resource usage and performance, offering insights into their behavior during protocol deployment.

Findings

Different clients exhibit varied resource consumption patterns.

Network perturbations significantly affect client performance.

Clients react differently to network changes and stress.

Abstract

Scalability is a common issue among the most used permissionless blockchains, and several approaches have been proposed accordingly. As Ethereum is set to be a solid foundation for a decentralized Internet web, the need for tackling scalability issues while preserving the security of the network is an important challenge. In order to successfully deliver effective scaling solutions, Ethereum is on the path of a major protocol improvement called Ethereum 2.0 (Eth2), which implements sharding. As the change of consensus mechanism is an extremely delicate matter, this improvement will be achieved through different phases, the first of which is the implementation of the Beacon Chain. For this, a specification has been developed and multiple groups have implemented clients to run the new protocol. In this work, we analyse the resource usage behaviour of different clients running as Eth2 nodes, comparing their performance and analysing differences. Our results show multiple network perturbations and how different clients react to it.