Where the slot goes: what held across six windows
· 17 min read
Besu's forkchoiceUpdated call has now been timed by six consensus clients across four windows, and by Besu itself. Every one of them puts it above 100 ms. On five of the six the peers sit in single or low double digits; on the sixth they do not, and that row is in the table below. The absolute numbers move around, the instruments disagree about each other, the software underneath changed three times, and the result keeps turning up.
That pattern, rather than any single measurement, is what this series has to report. The companion post deals with the instruments themselves and the ways they mislead; this one deals with the handful of results that showed up whichever instrument was pointed at them.