Cannon Performance Notes

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This page now lives on the Cannon wiki

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These are some notes taken from conversations with geohot about where Cannon's time is spent.

• Go runtime initialize: about 11M instructions. These could be folded into golden.json to exclude them from the trace (i.e. take the initial memory snapshot after initialization of the Go runtime)
• Cannon uses about 5-10M of instructions to process a transaction.
• 40% of Cannon's time is spent doing Keccak.
  • Hence we could reduce the size of the trace by almost 40% by replacing Keccak calls by a custom MIPS opcode.
• 20% is spent in ECDSA calculations

Execution speed figures:

• the unicorn configuration runs at 10MHz (i.e. 10M instructions per second) (~1 sec per tx)
• the evm configuration runs at around 100KHz (~2 min per tx)
• the chain configuration runs at around 1KHz (~3 hrs per tx)

Check the Cannon Overview for information on the mipsevm configurations.