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Author: Sam Williams, founder of Arweave; Translation: 0xjs@Bitchain Vision
Can AO achieve the same TPS as Solana?
The answer is: far more.Why?information.
I have a lot of respect for Solana’s engineering, which is often underestimated by non-developers.Let’s dive into the differences and tradeoffs between AO and Solana.
Getting started: What is messaging?
In computer science, when we want to process multiple inputs (such as transactions) of a system at the same time, we call it “parallelity”.There are two basic methods: shared memory and messaging.Let’s take a look in turn.
Shared memory
Solana is a very well-optimized shared memory machine.This means that each contract can directly read and write memory to other contracts.
This allows simultaneous update of “state” (data in the program – such as balance, etc.): they are all submitted at one time.This may be helpful, but it also means that when one user accesses certain data in the program, no other user can modify it.They wait for each other in a process called “lock contention.”
Alice “locks” the data, modifys it, “unlocks” the data before Bob can access it.They basically form a queue.
Shared memory systems can scale to a certain extent, and Solana pioneered the optimal design I’ve seen in a trustless environment, but then stopped.
To further expand, you have to take a different approach…
Message delivery
AO is a super optimization of another route: messaging.
In AO, each “contract” is its own asynchronous process.Each process runs independently at the speed of a single CPU thread, sending messages to other processes when interaction is required.You can think of each program as a single program on your computer, or an extremely fast version of the rollup/application chain.
When you exhaust the throughput of one process of your application, you can split the application into any number of other processes.
More processes—>Higher throughput—>More satisfied users.
There is no practical limit on the number of managed parallel processes in AO.The unique protocol limit inherits from Arweave: no more than 2^256 bytes.In terms of scale, this is more than the atoms in the universe.
On the other hand, you cannot “global” access to the memory of all other processes in the network – information must be requested via message.
Fortunately, the technology has been researched and deployed for more than 50 years in the field of computer science, making it easy to use.It is called Actor-oriented programming, which is also the origin of the AO name.Almost every service that users use on the internet is built using messaging – information, websites and the entire TradFi ecosystem.Even the Internet itself is a messaging machine.
What AO has innovated is to apply this approach to blockchain and smart contracts.Because in order to build Arweave, we have to solve the scalability of on-chain storage, so we built AO by using Arweave as the messaging layer, so it also inherits this scalability “free”.
On-chain data of any size—> On-chain messages of any size.
The first use of the system may be in the financial field, but I don’t think it will stop there.When each process is asynchronous, any number of calculations can run in the network simultaneously without affecting each other.
You can run computed AI agents with AO, and I use it to buy coffee in the store.Our processes are independent, so neither of us has to compete with each other for access to the system.There is no reason why it cannot scale to cover the computing load of the entire world.
To summarize:
There is no shared memory passing through message, no lock content, or capacity expansion.
What about the cost?Shared and synchronous access to global memory.
This cost is hardly noticeable if you use the right tools provided by AOS.It looks like a good deal.
This is a topic that computer scientists can discuss endlessly.There are a lot of nuances here, but if you understand this, congratulations, now you get the point.
Solana is a well-designed machine that brings the shared memory paradigm to the logical conclusions in the blockchain.AO Test Network has been online for 2 months and currently processes about 6% of Solana’s user traffic.
AO’s future is bright and has the potential to expand and grow.
