Performance¶

Benchmarks¶

Challenge Generation¶

PayGateway challenge header generation is fast — the bottleneck is never the middleware:

• 10,000 challenge headers in ~63ms (PayGateway, no wallet derivation)
• Address derivation (via wallet) adds ~1ms per challenge
• ProofGateway template signing (0xC3) adds ~2-3ms per challenge (ECDSA signing)

ARC Latency¶

The real bottleneck is ARC acceptance. Typical latencies:

Default: SEEN_ON_NETWORK with 5s timeout. Configurable per gateway.

Scaling Trade-offs¶

PayGateway (BSV-pay)¶

• Challenge generation: fast (no nonces, no signing)
• Settlement: synchronous ARC broadcast — server holds connection open
• Bottleneck: ARC round-trip on every request
• Scaling: limited by ARC throughput per server instance
• Best for: simple deployments, low-to-medium traffic, getting started

ProofGateway (BSV-proof)¶

• Challenge generation: slower (nonce provision + 0xC3 signing)
• Settlement: fast (just a mempool status check)
• Bottleneck: nonce provision (horizontally scalable)
• Scaling: broadcast distributed to clients, server is passive observer
• Best for: high traffic, enterprise deployments, horizontal scaling

Why ProofGateway Scales Better¶

In PayGateway, the server broadcasts every transaction — it's a relay. Under load, ARC connections stack up.

In ProofGateway, the client broadcasts and the server just confirms. The server's ARC interaction is a lightweight status query, not a synchronous broadcast. The heavy lifting (transaction construction, signing, broadcasting) is distributed across all clients.

The nonce provider can be horizontally scaled independently — it's just minting 1-sat UTXOs, which is fast and parallelisable.

Mitigation Strategies¶

ARC Timeout¶

The 5-second default timeout protects against ARC slowness. If ARC doesn't respond: - PayGateway: returns 504 Gateway Timeout - ProofGateway: returns 502 (mempool check failed)

Lower-value endpoints could use ACCEPTED_BY_NETWORK for faster response at slightly reduced certainty.

Rate Limiting¶

Not the middleware's concern — handle at nginx or via Rack::Attack. See deployment.md.

Connection Pooling¶

For high-traffic PayGateway deployments, consider HTTP connection pooling to ARC:

# Use a persistent HTTP client
http_client = Net::HTTP::Persistent.new
arc = BSV::Network::ARC.new("https://arcade.gorillapool.io",
                            api_key: "...",
                            http_client: http_client)

The SDK's ARC client accepts an injectable HTTP client for exactly this purpose.