[AIP-97][Discussion] Storage Format Change

[thepomeranian]

AIP Discussion

Scalability and performance have been a hot topic for L1 blockchains recent years. As the Aptos ecosystem grows, it becomes more and more important. There are frequently questions asked around how Aptos is storing the blockchain data, and going forward, with the amount of data keeps increasing, how they can be served in a scalable and reliable way, without putting too much additional work for operators who provide the data. The Aptos team has implemented several changes in the storage format as the first step. The goal of this AIP is to provide details on what was implemented and how it can be rolled out to mainnet. In addition to that, this AIP also include some future directions the Aptos team is aiming to go in the near future.

The change of storage format is implementation details, it doesn’t change any core protocol or data structure. The existing APIs mostly stay the same, with the exception that some APIs that depend on secondary indices are now required opt-in, and those secondary indices are built in an async manner.

The performance improvement of this storage format change will be various, depending on the # of states stored on blockchain, the types of transactions the blockchain is running, the hardware spec, etc. To give a rough idea, Aptos team has tested this in one of the testing environment using peer-to-peer transfer transactions. The TPS improves to ~25K from ~14K.

Read more about it here: https://github.com/aptos-foundation/AIPs/blob/main/aips/aip-97.md