⌚Analysis of the Bridge Node Celestia

This guide will analyze the load of servers on which Bridge Node Celestia and Consensus Node will be installed. In order to run a bridge node, you need to use public RPCs, or run Consensus Node yourself to receive RPCs. It’s worth mentioning right away that the team recommended using pruning = "nothing" for Consensus Node , but we decided to test various configurations

For our test, we took 4 VPS on Hetzner in the same location (Finland) - CPX41 8/16GB/240GB Accordingly, we will ru 4 Bridge nodes and 4 Consensus Nodes on 4 servers. Basic settings and installation are described in this article. The settings of each server will be slightly different and in our case have the following config:

Server1:

• pruning = "default"

• indexer = "null"

Server2:

• pruning = "custom" 1000/10

• indexer = "null"

Server3:

• pruning = "nothing"

• indexer = "null"

Server4:

• pruning = "default"

• indexer = "kv"

We will measure the following parameters:

• Uptime at https://tiascan.com/bridge-nodes

• Used hard disk space with df -m /dev/sda1

• Network traffic

• Load average with htop

Measurements will be taken immediately after synchronization, 2 hours after synchronization, 24 hours after synchronization, and 48 hours after synchronization. All measurements will be reflected in this Google spreadsheet and also in the screenshots

Main results

Network traffic results during Bridge run

Results of used hard disk space

Size comparison of .celestia-app and .celestia-bridge-blockspacerace-0 directories

Conclusions

• The network load on all 4 servers is approximately the same. And the difference that we see does not give us reason to pay attention to it

• Uptime on all 4 nodes also does not vary much and we see that all 4 nodes with different configurations stay within 99.34% - 99.36%, which is quite normal for these VPS

• Load average showed us the main load during the node synchronization period. But with a synchronized node, we see almost the same load on the servers. Only the server with Pruning=custom 1000/10 has a higher load compared to the other 3 servers

• The main difference is when measuring the occupied space on hard drives. Server3 with Pruning=nothing showed great results in saving hard disk space, although before the test I thought it would be the other way around. So, the difference between server3 occupied space was more than 2 times compared to other servers on which Pruning was configured differently. So, from the screenshots above, we see that the .celestia-bridge-blockspacerace-0 directory on server 3 takes only 6+GB instead of 80+ on other servers

Summing up, we can conclude that during installation we do not have to pay attention to indexing and network consumption - and most importantly, set Pruning=nothing