OnFinality - High Performance Public Infrastructure (Q4 2021)

Ongoing costs for the running of high performance, scalable, and reliable public infrastructure for Polkadot, Statemint and Westend. Posted here for any discussion before moving to a Treasury Proposal

Over the last 3 months (October, November, December 2021) we've provided a scalable free public API service so that everyone can access public pools of managed Polkadot, Statemint, and Westend nodes.

Between 2021-10-01 and 2021-12-31 our Polkadot API service has:

• Served an unprecedented total of 23,897,857,938 (23 billion) responses (an increase of 334% on the previous quarter)
• Accumulated over 71 TB of data egress (up 313% on Q3)
• The highest daily total was 515,417,945 responses in a single 24 hour period
• Our rolling 7 day average at the end of this period was over 227 million responses each day.
• Westend had over 377 million API responses in the period
• Statemint had over 295 million API responses in the period
• All time totals for Polkadot is 35,146,213,629 (35 Billion) since November

This last quarter was huge for Polkadot and OnFinality, the demand for our services was unprecedented. In early November we experienced a surge of activity coinciding with the announcement of the Polkadot Parachain Auctions that took us to our highest daily response count of over 515 million responses in a single day.

Towards the end of this period we also noticed additional load on the compute component of our resourcing that we believe is due to the first 5 parachains connecting to the main relay chain and the additional block verification that resulted. We scaled up the compute component of our infrastructure to maintain service levels as a result. Additionally we are closely watching the work that Dwellir is doing in the ecosystem to propose improvements to the RPC nodes.

Additionally, our experience shows significant performance improvements in terms of response times when the CPU usage is less than 50%. We observed a noticeable drop of service quality (in terms of response times) when the node is under load.

This proposal includes combined running costs for our infrastructure for Polkadot, Statemint, and Westend. The total combined running cost is USD $101,122.20

The full writeup is here