Cardano's block cost analysis

A home for Tweag's investigation into the cost structure of Cardano block validation

Extract blocks with

$ nix run github:tweag/ouroboros-consensus/aspiwack/explore-cardano#db-analyser -- --db path/to/db/ --config path/to/config.json --in-mem --dump --block-file path/to/blocks.csv --transaction-file path/to/transactions.csv --analyse-from 4492900

Where

• --db points to a directory with a node's block database
• --config points to the config file that the node used
• --block-file and --transaction-file point to possibly non-existent files, where the data will be dumped.

Did you know?

Some early-project observations

Blocks

The smallest a block has ever been on mainnet is 633 bytes. The largest is 648KB (633KiB). For a mean average of 17KiB per block.

There seems to be trends in block size, see how it evolves over time:

Most blocks are pretty small though

Witnesses

Here's the distribution of the number of script witnesses in transactions