Today's Update

Yesterday was a marathon testing day for Elemental Chat - which really means that we were testing the infrastructure of the Holo network and the infrastructure of Holochain. I know I may sound like a broken record about this, but these tests of Elemental Chat are the best and easiest way to challenge and evaluate the infrastructure and learn things about how the complex layers of our tech work together.During the course of 7 tests, we manually created more than 3600 messages - that is about how many were created by the 64 community testers in a week previously. We ran sequential speed tests, simultaneous speed tests, and then we ran 4 iterations of testing with 10-12 nodes each sending simultaneously. Our intention in doing these specific tests was to roughly model the expected number of simultaneous transactions that might occur on the network when we have 500+ hosts running Elemental Chat.How many will be configured as nodes on the Elemental Chat app? How many will be using it actively at any given time? How many will be sending messages at the exact same time? We were assessing those questions with how each layer of the infrastructure responds and considering if the current performance levels were sufficient for a release.When one person is sending hundreds of messages extremely fast, performance is essentially perfect. When a few people are sending hundreds of messages extremely fast, it is still very good.When 10+ people are each sending 50 messages in a row, we saw the user experience begin to shift. Early messages were received fast, and later messages were received fast, but many of the messages in the middle were delayed. All were eventually received.We adjusted various settings throughout the day as we repeated the same test. This allowed us to rule out several possible causes of the delay. Some delays in transaction speed are expected right now for Holo and Holochain. We have not optimised networking for Holochain and that is definitely on the roadmap! In terms of the Go / No-Go for an upcoming release to all hosts, we are very close. We are tuning our automated testing to better assess the super fast signals used for the immediate receipt of messages to understand if we can make a quick optimisation. We'll share the results of that assessment this week.