bBench: A Comprehensive Performance Benchmark for Blockchain Applications

Abstract

The performance assessment of blockchain applications holds significant challenges due to their decentralized architecture, immutable smart contracts, distributed ledgers, and operational costs such as gas fees. Existing blockchain benchmarks often either fail to fully capture blockchain-specific behaviors or offer limited configurability and metric reporting. In this paper, we present a new and comprehensive benchmark designed explicitly for blockchain applications, named bBench. Building on established principles from traditional benchmarking and by specializing them in the blockchain context and supported by customized blockchain tools (i.e., Hyperledger Caliper, web3.eth, and node-os-utils), bBench characterizes blockchain application performance in four dimensions: network performance, resource utilization, storage usage, and operational cost. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our benchmark through a case study involving 12 smart contract applications with varying performance demands, some of which hold known vulnerabilities. The results show the benchmark’s ability to quantify performance deviations across different applications, as well as those caused by the activation of specific vulnerabilities.