Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain: Chaincode Performance Analysis

Abstract

Hyperledger Fabric, created and supported by the Linux Foundation and IBM, is one of the most popular open-source blockchain permissioned platforms that has been already used in many industrial scenarios. One of the main characteristics of this platform is that it provides a smart contract system that relies on general-purpose languages instead of an ad hoc one. In fact, a chaincode in the Fabric platform (the equivalent of the Ethereum smart contract) is a software program which encapsulates the business logic for the creation and modification of logical assets in the ledger that can be written in different general-purpose programming languages (currently Java, Go, and Node.js). This paper analyses the transaction performance of the Fabric platform by identifying at a fine-grained degree level the factors that most contribute to the overall overhead. In particular, we focus on how the transaction latency is affected by the programming language adopted for implementing the chaincode and by varying the number of participating endorser peers. Finally, the paper shows a thorough test assessment aimed at evaluating the impact of the different chaincode implementation on performance overhead. As it emerges from our experimental results, Go is the most performing programming language.