How many transaction per second are registered by a full node?

Question

I'm reading different answers about the txs/sec on the tangle and I think I'm missing something.

Someone says that right now there are 1000 txs/sec, someone else says 1-2 txs/sec.
What's the difference between these answers? Are they talking about different things?

Main question(s)
How many txs/sec does a full node actually receives?
A full node broadcasts transactions issued by the light nodes connected to it. Does it also re-broadcasts transactions received by other full nodes? Does it prioritize one or the other?

Answer 1

1000 txs/sec might be referencing the total of transactions happening on the Tangle (sum of txs/sec of all Nodes). The number of txs/sec a Node receives depends on three things:

• How many light nodes are connected (and submiting transactions) to it
• How many transactions it is receing from its neighbors
• Download Bandwidth

We can see that the txs/sec a node receives is a value that changes from Node to Node depending on its specs. The number of txs/sec a Node can push to the Tangle depends on its upload bandwidth.

From comments bellow:

how many of these transaction will be seen by a full node with a "standard" setup?

An average transaction in IOTA has 1.6Kb, a network with 1000 txs/sec would be pushing 1.6Mb/s to the Nodes. It's not a value that high, a standard setup could handle it. Even though if a Node couldn't handle it, the network is asynchronous, it means that the Nodes don't have to see/view the same set of transactions

@edit: resumed the comments below here.

Answer 2

As long as there is no sharding solution available, a fullnode must handle a tps equals to the tps of the whole network.

So if all participants send 1000 transactions per second, a full node should be able to handle 1000 transaction per second. Otherwise, the fullnode will be desynchronized and will not work as expected (mainly it will select tips that aren't tips anymore and so transactions attached by this desynchronized node have less chance to be confirmed.).

It is true that all fullnode don't need to have the exact same view of the tangle, but they must have almost the same view (dead branch don't need to be known by every node, but the main branch must eventually be on all fullnodes. Intuitively, it is the same in bitcoin : the longest chain must be known by all fullnodes, orphan blocks can be ignored).

Today, the tps on the tangle is between 3 to 8 tps, so fullnodes should be able to handle 3 to 8 tps.

Regarding the gossip : when a fullnode receive a transaction that isn't yet in it's database : it will broadcast the transaction to it's neighbors. If the transaction is already in it's database it will simply ignore it.

Regarding prioritization : the current IRI implementation order all it's internal queues according the pow invested during attachement. The min weight magnitude is currently 14 on the main net: all transactions with a hash ending with more than 14 zero trites will be handled in priority. (and of course all tx with less that 14 zero trites will be considered as invalid)

Answer 3

How many txs/sec does a full node actually receives?

You can check https://iotamonitor.com to see the current transactions being attached. At the time of writing this (timestamp: 20180522), there are 5.77 transactions per seccond (tps) and 1.84 confirmed transactions per seccond (ctps). The main one you want to observe in ctps because thats what other cryptos brag about.

I saw that post about 1000tx/s and was very very confused by it. I think they might have been saying the test net had almost 1000 tps on it at one point. This was also false, it was closer to 800. Currently the max tps is 1000 because the coordinate has a max. This can be lifted in the future. There is no limit to the tps or ctps for the tangle.

A full node broadcasts transactions issued by the light nodes connected to it. Does it also re-broadcasts transactions received by other full nodes?

Yes. When a tranaction is broadcasted each node sends it to each neighbor, if it has already heard and told its neightbors about the the broadcast it does not retell its neighbors.

Does it prioritize one or the other?

No the network can very quickly tell everyone about a transaction, no reason to incentive one over the other unless your node was malicious. One malicious node only telling its neighbors about its own transactions is fine, a bunch of them could cause isles of silence. But as an iota node host, it is up to you to make sure your neightbors and rebroadcasting, otherwise you stop communicating with them and find someone else. Its a good question to ask how nelson works with this.