A look at Steem blocksize evolution
Block size is an important indicator of blockchain activity and performance, with Steem blocks passing 4 millions now, I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look to the block size evolution over the past few months.
Our first chart is a semi-logarithmic chart of overall block size, highlighting the min, average and max block sizes recorded since the first block.
Overall daily block size (in bytes)
| Min | 115 bytes |
| Avg | 489 bytes |
| Max | 1697403 bytes |
| Deviation | 7678 bytes |
Other than the obvious growth in the average block size which is a good indicator that posting have been more active lately, we notice also that some blocks are still empty, which indicates that we are nowhere near congestion levels, and the blockchain is still handling the quantity of data very well, even during the peaks to 1.69 mb block size reached during the last spam attack.
Another important thing is that the reduction of block size to mitigate this kind of attacks have successfully limited the max size to 65 kb, which we can see is now the max size in the latest blocks.
In our next chart, we take a look at the cumulative linear block size:
Overall daily cumulative block size (in bytes)
In this chart we can see that there is a definitive increase of block size growth over the past two weeks, which confirms steemers have been very active posting lately. The current total size of blocks is around 2 gb, which has doubled since July, 22th.
Our last chart highlights the block size recorded in the past week:
Last week's hourly block size (in bytes)
| Min | 115 bytes |
| Avg | 1322 bytes |
| Max | 65353 bytes |
| Deviation | 2002 bytes |
In this chart, we can see that the block size is now stabilized around an average of 1.3 kb with spikes to the max block size and also dips to the min size. The deviation also went down, which indicates more blocks are close to the median size.
In conclusion, we can see that steem blockchain has successfully supported an important block size increase, and does seem to be ready for much more, as we still have many empty blocks.
The increase of the average block size itself is also an indicator of the growth in activity, which correlates with the growth in users.
You say the current total size of blocks is 2GB; you mean that's the size of the entire blockchain? And that's doubled since July 22? And everybody running a full node has a complete copy of that?
It makes me wonder if this sort of growth is sustainable.
Yes the size of the blockchain is around 2 gb now, it is sustainable because the trusted full nodes are run by witnesses which need to keep their hardware up to the requirements.
Easily, http://pricewatch.com lists a 6 Tb drive for $170.
I could put a NAS with 18 TB together for about $1000, with RAID 0
@biophil 2GB isn't bad at all that's still small enough to fit on a cheap flash drive. Some block chains are 20 times that size and run just fine like Ethereum. Storage is super cheap.
Not to mention there's a big difference between storing the whole block chain for archival purposes, and actually needing to backtrack through it regularly. The former is easily done on a mechanical drive because read/write speeds and seek times aren't really an issue. If the latter was the case it would pretty much require a RAID of SSD's to mitigate the speed issue of random seeks and the reading/writing of non sequential sectors on a drive.
I'm really surprised there are still empty blocks. I'm wondering if this is a mining issue or technical issue rather than in direct relation to posting. I know there are still occasionally empty bitcoin blocks.
Actually I was surprised as well but like @bones mentioned here, the block time is 3 seconds, which allows for more data absorption thus some blocks are still empty, which is a good thing in my opinion, it means Steem can handle much more data in the future.
Yes definitely it makes sense. I think this allows a lot more bandwidth than most other blockchains. Is this due to it being built on graphene?
Yes, Graphene is definitely the fastest blockchain implementation that has proven its performance in the real world.
Yes I found out about it when I was investing in Peerplays and then got to use the Bitshares exchange. Although I didn't really like the exchange layout it gave me a new appreciation for the technology. Bitshares was one of the few crypto projects that I missed until recently, better late than never though.
The small blocks and block time are exactly why there's still empty blocks.
Steem was built to upscale like crazy which by all accounts is a good thing. Empty blocks = room for growth without a need for a hard fork to increase the block size or reduce block time confirmation. I've noticed that the average time to complete a STEEM transaction is about 5 minutes which is nothing compared to the hours I've waited for a Bitcoin transaction to be validated.
Block size and block confirmation times are something Bitcoin users know all too well is a real pain. It has been a matter of debate for many months because a hard fork to increase the Bitcoin block size to over the 1MB cap would render current ASIC's useless and put the screws to many major mining operations.
Bitcoin has all but maxed out the network's ability to process blocks at a reasonable rate because of the block size issue, but no one can seem to stop arguing about it long enough to just fork and fix it. It's a real damned if you do, damned if you don't issue that I'm sure we'll hear more about sooner rather than later.
A new block is produced about every 3 seconds. With that kind of speed, I'm not surprised there are still some empty blocks.
Thank you for compiling these stats, and thank you for the knowledge!
is there a max block size cap like in bitcoin? If so is this something that is adjusted automatically?
There is a hard cap set by witnesses and a lower soft cap that causes bandwidth limits to kick in (users' allowable bandwidth is limited by SP).
Thanks @smooth for the explanation!
oh! very good chart. I see at 22 July block size exceeded max size.
Great Post Man :)
Bitcoin has 1MB block size (max). Steem has how much max 2MB ?
nice post !!!
Check @smooth reply above.
Hi! @masteryoda
STEEM of block size of growth is testament to the growth of steemit.
Also I hope more and more of the growth in the future.
The growth is Great! Thank s @masteryoda!
wow! blocksize is increasing .........
that's good :-)
Thank you for your charts and analysis. Always informative and greatly appreciated. I am looking forward to your next analysis of this vibrant steemit community.
Steem on,
Mike