What is the difference between blockchain performance and blockchain scalability?

Question

I really don´t get the difference between blockchain scalability and blockchain performance. Can some explain it to me?

Answer 1

The differences would be conceptual and categoric. Blockchain scalability as a concept has wider significance in terms of scalability of a blockchain network, node, protocol etc. Blockchain scalability can be measured in terms of a collection of parameters such as transactions per second, latency, response time etc. It is the ability of a blockchain network to scale as per the demands of the participating nodes.

Blockchain performance is quite a subjective term in comparison with scalability. Performance is the current throughput from any live system. Blockchain performance could be measured in terms of the current capacity of nodes and network to manage data at rest and data in motion. It could be measured in terms of the total active users and total concurrent users. Performance improvement and performance optimisation can be done without scaling the system. In the world of blockchain systems, methods like pruning, zero knowledge proofs, compression etc. are widely adopted performance improvement techniques.

The following diagram from the art of scalability book is a great illustration of the different measures of scalability such as scale by cloning, scale by functional decomposition and scale by partitoning. These are three different ways to scale systems. Systems of blockchain protocols can also be scaled in three ways like this. One is scaling by increasing the number of identical nodes ( cloning ). Another approach is scaling by introducing different layers ( side chains, state channels etc. ). Then we can also scale them by creating shards.

Answer 2

Performance is an indication of the responsiveness of a system to execute any action within a given time interval, that means even if your blockchain is handling e.g. 5 transactions how is it handling it? while scalability is ability of a system either to handle increases in load without impact on performance or for the available resources to be readily increased.

Answer 3

When we talk about blockchain networks, I can suggest the following approach:

Performance is a rate at which useful data is added to the blockchain state.

Scalability is a maximal level of performance, security and decentralisation which target blockchain network can handle simultaneously.

Answer 4

To keep it short and simple, Blockchain scalability is the ability of a blockchain network to expand its capacity in order to accommodate a growing number of transactions. Blockchain performance is a measure of how well a blockchain network can process transactions in a timely and efficient manner.