Celestia Light Node Perform Analysis

4 min readMar 30, 2023

Celestia Light node tasks started on march 29 and I am selected as one of the light node operators that I would like to give and compare some information about the hardware and Celestia software performance

For the Celestia Light node, recommended hardware requirements are given as ;

Memory: 2 GB RAM
CPU: Single Core
Disk: 5 GB SSD Storage
Bandwidth: 56 Kbps for Download/56 Kbps for Upload

I have run the Celestia Light node on Contabo Large VPS in the USA Region and the specs are like this;

My VPS Memory:

sudo lshq -short -C memory

My VPS CPU’s: 8 cores

lscpu

My SSD Disk result:

lsblk -d
df -H /

My VPS Bandwidth:

Sudo apt install speedtest-cli
speedtest-cli

COMPARISON

As shown below the machine specification is higher than recommended hardware given by Celestia Team and VPS only runs the Celestia light node alone. here is the comparison ;

Memory: 2 GB RAM
My VPS Memory: 30 GB RAM (Shared)
CPU: Single Core
My VPS CPU: has 8 Cores
Disk: 5 GB SSD Storage
My VPS Disk: 420GB SSD
Bandwidth: 56 Kbps for Download/56 Kbps for Upload /
My VPS Bandwidth: 468 Mbit/s Download/469.95 Mbit/s Upload

Operating System

cat /etc/os-release

#Output
NAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION="20.04.6 LTS (Focal Fossa)"
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS"
VERSION_ID="20.04"

Celestia Light Node CPU performance

I have run the Celestia node as a service therefore I would like to measure the performance of the Celestia-lightd.service using the “perf” tool.

I used the following command to measure the memory usage of the Celestia-lightd.service:

sudo perf stat -p $(pidof celestia) sleep 10

This command measured the memory usage of the Celestia-lightd.service for 10 seconds and displays. I have tested the code for 10 / 30 / 60 seconds durations and the results are as;

root@vmi728168:~# sudo perf stat -p $(pidof celestia) sleep 10

 Performance counter stats for process id '27760':

          1,036.24 msec task-clock                #    0.104 CPUs utilized
            10,332      context-switches          #    0.010 M/sec
               914      cpu-migrations            #    0.882 K/sec
                 0      page-faults               #    0.000 K/sec
     1,484,351,932      cycles                    #    1.432 GHz
       238,914,034      stalled-cycles-frontend   #   16.10% frontend cycles idle
       394,956,947      stalled-cycles-backend    #   26.61% backend cycles idle
     1,066,790,002      instructions              #    0.72  insn per cycle
                                                  #    0.37  stalled cycles per insn
        79,746,473      branches                  #   76.957 M/sec
           137,236      branch-misses             #    0.17% of all branches

      10.003413830 seconds time elapsed

root@vmi728168:~# sudo perf stat -p $(pidof celestia) sleep 30

 Performance counter stats for process id '27760':

          4,354.50 msec task-clock                #    0.145 CPUs utilized
            38,769      context-switches          #    0.009 M/sec
             4,450      cpu-migrations            #    0.001 M/sec
                78      page-faults               #    0.018 K/sec
     6,289,417,810      cycles                    #    1.444 GHz
     1,267,687,538      stalled-cycles-frontend   #   20.16% frontend cycles idle
     1,176,377,297      stalled-cycles-backend    #   18.70% backend cycles idle
     2,446,005,529      instructions              #    0.39  insn per cycle
                                                  #    0.52  stalled cycles per insn
       277,048,160      branches                  #   63.623 M/sec
           823,672      branch-misses             #    0.30% of all branches

      30.004314656 seconds time elapsed

root@vmi728168:~# sudo perf stat -p $(pidof celestia) sleep 60

 Performance counter stats for process id '27760':

          6,393.99 msec task-clock                #    0.107 CPUs utilized
            56,503      context-switches          #    0.009 M/sec
             5,773      cpu-migrations            #    0.903 K/sec
               162      page-faults               #    0.025 K/sec
     9,128,614,588      cycles                    #    1.428 GHz
     1,610,033,688      stalled-cycles-frontend   #   17.64% frontend cycles idle
     2,049,734,788      stalled-cycles-backend    #   22.45% backend cycles idle
     5,433,829,680      instructions              #    0.60  insn per cycle
                                                  #    0.38  stalled cycles per insn
       457,107,718      branches                  #   71.490 M/sec
         1,309,744      branch-misses             #    0.29% of all branches

      60.003704439 seconds time elapsed