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Informed decisions require metrics
It is not hard to walk towards a goal on the horizon. But if you are blindfolded, that task becomes impossible. You will drift off course without something to guide you. The same goes for the iroha2 core team. We have a good idea of where we would like to go. But we will not get there unless we have good guide, aka, good metrics. Specifically, real world measurements of a network's throughput, it's transactions per secondWith good data and metrics it is easy to make good engineering decisions. We want to improve iroha2's performance. Therefore, we want performance data, we want TPS numbers. But it can't be just any data, it must be accurate. An optimization might benefit performance on a developers own machine but be a regression in the real world use case. If the data is inaccurate our decisions will be too. Good metrics are therefore paramount.
Death by a thousand cuts
Currently the iroha2 codebase suffers from general slowness. Slowness that is very hard to pin down to any particular place in the codebase. There is no obvious bottle neck we can address. Instead we are faced with needing lots of small improvements in many places. The measurable performance difference due to any specific change is negligable. But combined they are what will get us to 50x. Even though we cannot use metrics to decide what change is good. They are still useful in making sure we have not made things worse. If you know that you haven't introduced a regression in performance you can refactor and simplify with confidence. This will allow us to do necessary optimization/simplification faster.
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