Polygon Block Performance
Finds the average time between blocks on Polygon and the maximum and minimum recorded time between two blocks. How many transactions are done in a block on average and how polygon compares to L1 such as Solana.
Average time between blocks on polygon
The minimum time between blocks on Polygon was 2 seconds, this was also the mode time between blocks.
The maximum time between blocks was 25 seconds , block number 30,341,760 on the 4th of July.
The average time between blocks ranged from a minimum of 2.09 seconds June 11 to a maximum of 2.48 seconds on July 25.
Comparisons of Polygon to other L1 blockchains
Solana is considered to be the fastest blockchain in regards to transactions per second.
Solana’s biggest time between blocks was 8666 seconds (2 hours 14 minutes) on 30th April. This was due to a network outage that brought Solana down for 7 hours in total that day. My query shows a bigger outage at block 136512013 on June 6 but this was due to some missing tables in the flipside database.
Shortest block time on Solana was 0 seconds, this is obviously incorrect and is due to the database only recording to the nearest seconds. As Solana averages block times are under 1 second, this means two block transactions can be recorded for exactly the same time. On April 10 the average blocktime was .54 seconds which would suggest the minimum blocktime for Solana would have been less than .5 of a second. June 7 had the longest average blocktime of 1.07 seconds.
When comparing blockchains performance, times between blocks is an important metric. If there are large gaps between blocks this can be a sign of technical issues with the blockchain and can cause significant problems for users and applications. The polygon.core.fact_blocks table was used to calculate the difference in block times, this table only has records starting from June 6, 2022.
Conclusion
Polygon may not be anywhere near as fast as Solana, but it is definitely more consistent and reliable. The longest blocktime on Polygon was 25 seconds, which isn’t great, but when compared against Solana having 7 hours of network downtime in 1 day, it is clearly superior in this metric. The average time between blocks on Polygon was also more consistent than solana, with a range of .39 seconds compared to Solana’s .53 seconds.
In terms of transactions per block, Polygon is nearly 2000 transactions per block less than solana but nearly 5x more than the Flow blockchain. Solana can clearly do more transactions per second than Polygon but this is currently at the trade off of being less reliable than Polygon, having 5 significant outages in 2022.