Activity Idea: Create an effective transaction spam utility in JS / RUST

[shawntabrizi]

A common thing that has been built multiple times is a tool which floods a node / network with transactions.

To do this at maximum throughput is not trivial, and requires knowledge of:

• manipulating nonce
• pre-signing transactions
• checking the tx pool for queued tx
• adjusting node parameters to allow for bigger pools
• etc...

This should be a full half day exercise, and we make it a competition between students to see who can get the highest numbers.

[nuke-web3]

https://github.com/paritytech/subxt would be likely the best Rust lib to use - perhaps we could ask the team there to help design this as a jupyter notebook? This seems like a good fit for such a thing, or a stand-alone crate 🤔

Their internal channel: https://matrix.to/#/!lVvMINUrllAJPjlOTY:matrix.parity.io?via=matrix.parity.io

[sacha-l]

Pasting in a rough sketch of this workshop instructions. I have some questions @shawntabrizi, mainly:

• How are students recording results? How can you know how close you are to maximum throughput?
• What should students connect to? A local node ? A network we set up ?

I think we should encourage students to write Rust code, hence pointing them to subxt. I'm talking to James about this and to get help on fleshing this out.

Workshop: Create an effective transaction spam utility

The goal of this workshop is to build a tool which floods a node / network with transactions at maximum throughput.

Guidelines

Since this course is Rust based, these guidelines assume you complete this workshop using subxt.

You will be required to:

• manipulate the nonce of a transaction
• pre-sign transactions
• check the tx pool for queued txns
• adjust node parameters to allow for bigger pools

Steps

(brain dump for now)

• Basically take this as a rough sketch of how to construct an extrinsic and send it: https://github.com/paritytech/polkadot-interaction-examples-rs/blob/main/src/bin/05_transfer_balance.rs
• Use author_pendingExtrinsics to check pending transactions.

Submission and results

Please submit your source code and a results.

[wirednkod]

@JoshOrndorff is this something we need to keep open still?

[JoshOrndorff]

I still think it's a cool idea. I don't have any concrete plans to do it. IDK the semantics for that kind of thing.

[shawntabrizi]

potentially this will be the topic of my talk if I go to Sub0, so maybe i can create a basis from that