Parallelizing Stellar Core: The First Step Toward 5000 TPS

The Stellar Development Foundation (SDF) is working on major upgrades to Stellar Core to enhance scalability and reach a theoretical limit of 5000 transactions per second. This involves making more efficient use of existing CPU capacity, thus avoiding the need for hardware upgrades. The SDF’s roadmap includes lowering block times from 5 seconds to 2.5 seconds as part of their short to medium-term goals. The first set of improvements, implemented in Stellar Core v22.1.0, includes parallel transaction dissemination, significantly lowering main thread workload. The introduction of parallel infrastructure enables tasks such as signature verification and traffic deduplication to run concurrently, enhancing overall performance. Future blog posts will discuss ongoing changes, like isolating execution, necessary for fully parallelized operations in Stellar Core.