Hidenori Shinohara from Stellar's core team discusses Pull Mode, a new transaction broadcasting optimization that removes duplicate messages across the network. Simulations showed TPS improved from 326 to 563 transactions per second, a 73% increase.
Stellar core engineer Hidenori Shinohara presents Pull Mode, a protocol improvement for transaction broadcasting that addresses inefficiencies in how nodes share transactions. Currently, nodes can receive the same transaction multiple times from different peers, wasting bandwidth and CPU resources. Pull Mode implements an ask-before-send mechanism where nodes query peers with transaction hashes before sending full transactions, eliminating duplicates. The team validated the design through extensive simulations using Docker, Kubernetes, and AWS clusters to model realistic network conditions including node topology and geographic latency. Results showed significant TPS improvement from 326 to 563 transactions per second in simulated conditions. The simulation framework itself is publicly available, though requires configuration expertise to deploy.