Efficient Load Management for Blockchain Nodes: Introducing dRPC Load Balancing

As blockchain technology continues to evolve, one problem blockchain developers face is managing traffic/payloads efficiently. Blockchain nodes, tasked with processing millions of transaction requests and payloads from APIs, are at risk of becoming bottlenecks because of unbalanced traffic. This can increase network latency, reduce transaction throughput, and ultimately affect the performance of your DApp. So, efficient load management is needed to prevent this problem.

dRPC load balancing solution addresses these issues. Designed specifically for the blockchain, the web3 infrastructure company has a lot of measures in place to intelligently manage payloads and traffic, even in peak periods. dRPC helps blockchain developers to maintain high availability, optimize network performance, and scale their DApp efficiently, ensuring seamless user experience.

This article explores dRPC’s load-balancing technology, how it works, and its benefits. By understanding the fundamentals of this technology, you can be sure how to integrate them into your process, and ultimately influence user experience. So, whether you’re building a DApp, DeFi platform, or NFT marketplace, this article will help you learn the fundamentals of load balancing in blockchain technology and how it affects your DApp’s user experience.

Without ado, let’s get to it!

What Is Load Balancing?

Load balancing is an algorithm that helps distribute workload evenly across nodes in the blockchain network. It accepts incoming network traffic and decides which server can perfectly handle the request based on different factors like current load on each node, availability, node location,  and response time.

A load balancer contributes to improving network performance and availability. Assuming a node fails, the load balancer redirects the traffic to other underutilized nodes. It distributes the load evenly across all nodes, ensuring efficient request handling and optimal resource utilization.

Load balancer contributes to improving network performance and availability. It helps to prevent overloading/underutilization of RPC nodes. It also improves fault tolerance by assigning tasks to active nodes when RPC nodes fail. As a result, it can improve network throughput, and reduce latency and response time.

Benefits of Load Balancing

A load balancer is an essential component of blockchain technology. It ensures efficient request handling and optimal resource utilization while enhancing system performance. Here are its benefits to blockchain technology.

1. Improved Reliability

Load balancing prevents performance bottlenecks by reducing the likelihood of downtime during network congestion. The load balancing algorithm can reroute traffic to other RPC nodes in case of node failure, which ensures continuous availability. It maximizes resource utilization and prevents any single service node from becoming a bottleneck.

2. Efficient Request Handling

The load balancer intelligently distributes requests to underutilized RPC nodes to increase efficiency. Instead of turning a node into a bottleneck, the balancer spreads the request to other underutilized nodes and prevents underutilization/overloading.

3. Improved Scalability

Load balancing helps scale the server infrastructure on demand without affecting the network. It allows easy addition of new RPC providers to accommodate increased demand, ensuring ecosystem smart growth.

4. Prevent Centralization

A load balancer helps distribute loads evenly across nodes on a blockchain network. Without a load balancer, there is usually a risk of loads/traffic being routed through a single node. This could lead to bottlenecks in high-traffic scenarios, which can overwhelm the node and cause service disruption.

Apart from being a bottleneck, this can lead to centralization, which can be easily exploited by bad actors and ultimately lead to a single point of failure. But with load balancer, loads are intelligently spread evenly across multiple nodes and even if there is a failure, the loads are automatically redirected to other available nodes.

dRPC’s Load Balancing Solution: How Does it Work?

dRPC is a decentralized web3 infrastructure provider that focuses on decentralization. It’s a gateway for web3 developers and users to access a distributed network of independent third-party providers and public nodes.

dRPC uses open-source features and components to ensure the uttermost decentralization of the infrastructure. With features like load balancers, workloads are intelligently distributed among nodes, and requests are handled efficiently no matter the traffic congestion.

dRPC infrastructure consists of key components like Dshackle and Dproxy, which enhance and optimize DApps performance.

Components of dRPC’s Load Balancing System

Let’s check out some of the core components of dRPC.

1. Dshackle

Dshackle is an open-source fault-tolerant load-balancing library by Emerald Pay. It ensures reliable routing to multiple nodes. It also ensures requests are executed by a suitable RPC node. dRPC has its fork of Dshackle, meaning that it has improved on the Emerald pay’s version of for integration with their system.

This open-source load balancing tool provides standard blockchain JSON RPC over HTTP and WebSocket, advanced gRPC-based API, asynchronous execution, secure TLS, and intelligent routing based on data availability.

dRPC’s Dshackle provides useful features for routing and load balancing like the ability to track current chain heads, and prioritize and deprioritize nodes based on activeness. It also uses several other factors like the location of nodes, current height, and request method.

2. Dproxy

Dproxy is a central gateway proxy (a service gateway that receives blockchain requests and forwards them to endpoints) for dRPC’s network of independent RPC providers/public nodes. It intelligently distributes workload and ensures efficient request handling.

Dproxy receives users' requests from DApps and selects the best data provider to fulfill the request based on the providers' ranking. The providers' ranking is determined by a machine learning algorithm, which takes into account factors like current performance, current provider status, provider capabilities, and the amount of compute units that each provider has secured recently.

For efficient load distribution, Dproxy maintains a rating system that's calculated every second.

The Core Features of dRPC Load Balancing

Wondering why dRPC is one of the most preferred RPC infrastructure providers? Let’s check some of the core features

1. Intelligent Traffic Distribution

dRPC intelligently routes network traffic across available nodes using machine learning algorithms for efficient load distribution. This web3 infrastructure offers several stages of decision-making, which are required to distribute loads to nodes without underutilizing or overloading them.

dRPC decision-making stages let requests be routed to the best provider for low latency and efficient load handling. The requests flow easily from one stage to another based on the best possible option for optimal results.

2. Geo Balancing

For low latency, dRPC also employs geographical load balancing features that ensure requests are sent to nodes in the same geographical locations as the clients. Nodes closer to clients ensure that requests are fulfilled as quickly as possible.

Although dRPC only has two deployments in the US central and Europe west, they use Cloudflare geo load balancing to automatically route requests to the node closer to the user’s location. dRPC system ensures that they prioritize providers from the same region as you.

For example, if a client is based in the US, dRPC will only route their request to the closest RPC node, which is the US central. The dRPC’s load balancer ensures that no requests from the US are sent to RPC providers in other regions. The cloud geo load balancer helps route requests to the most appropriate nodes.

3. Real-Time Monitoring

dRPC has an internal monitoring technology that tracks node performance and rates them based on several factors. The provider rating defines how perfect a RPC provider is for a client request.

This rating system is a multi-dimensional feature that includes methods, chain type, a source region, and a kind to filter the type of provider (either public, best latency, or all). Based on filtering and selection, dRPC calculates the provider's performance in terms of latency, errors, and suitability for the client’s request handling.

This real-time monitoring feature makes it easier to adjust dRPC node settings based on the current situation and the best-case scenario.

4. Easy Integration

dRPC isn’t only designed to be a native web3 infrastructure. It’s also designed to be easily integrated into your decentralized application. To connect your DApp to dRPC nodes, all you need to do is sign up, set up your API, and integrate the environmental variables into your DApps.

If you need a practical tutorial on dRPC implementation, read How to Monitor Blockchain Transactions in Real Time With dRPC and Web3.js

How Does dRPC Load Balancing Work?

dRPC’s job is to connect users' requests to the best and most appropriate provider in a decentralized way. How does this occur without latency and maximum efficiency? Load Balancing!

Load balancing can be tricky, but with the help of dRPC’s request execution flow, requests can be executed smoothly. How does dRPC load balancing work? Let’s check out the execution flow of the dRPC load-balancing solution.

1. Start Request Stage

Once users execute a request, the request execution flow starts automatically. The first stage is the strategy selection stage where the right strategy is selected for load balancing. This strategy will define the algorithm needed for selecting the appropriate provider to execute the request.

Here are the two strategies supported by dRPC:

• One-off Strategies: is a simple strategy that returns one selected provider and errors on subsequent calls. It is selected when client requests can be handled by a single provider and retries are not needed.

• Strategies with Retries: are the default strategies used in all other use cases. It allows for several retries after the initial request execution. User requests that usually require this type of execution are more complex.

  2. SelectProvider Stage

This stage is where the provider is selected. Once the system selects a strategy suitable for client requests, it then uses the strategy to determine the appropriate provider for request execution.

Here the Dshackle and the Dproxy components are initiated to select the most suitable RPC provider based on the ranking mechanism. The ranking mechanism is also an aggregation of several factors by a machine learning algorithm.

Once an appropriate provider is selected, the execution flow moves to the next stage, else the request is considered failed.

3. Lock Cost Stage

The lock cost stage ensures the user can pay for dRPC's services. Once a provider is selected, the cost for the best-case scenario is locked.

4. Send Request Stage

Here, the client’s request is sent to the selected provider either through HTTP or WebSocket (depending on the request method).

5. Receive Response Stage

Responses are received for the request sent to the provider. There are three possible scenarios:

• Request failed scenario: This scenario is possible when an error (either from dRPC or the RPC node provider) occurs during request processing.

• Retries: This scenario is when there is an error but a retry is possible. In this case, the request is sent to a different provider. This case can happen when the selected provider can't fulfill the request.

• Success: A response is considered successful when the request is fulfilled or when an error is malformed. A malformed request gives an error that is not retrievable. An example is when a user’s request contains errors.

If the response is successful, the execution flow moves to the next stage.

6. Complete Request Stage

The complete request stage is needed to calculate the total cost of the service rendered by the RPC node provider. The successful response will trigger the execution flow to complete the request.

7. Final Cost Stage

At this final stage, the final cost of the request is calculated and the locked cost is adjusted based on the final cost, which is then deducted from the client's account.

In conclusion, load balancing should be an essential technology for every blockchain developer because it can significantly improve the performance, reliability, and scalability of their DApp. So, whether you’re building a DeFi platform, an NFT marketplace, or any other DApp, connecting with an RPC infrastructure with an inbuilt load balancing technology, like dRPC, will enable you to optimize your infrastructure for a better user experience and a sustainable growth.