I have concerns about the performance of the Electrum server software as
well.  It seems to load data one block at a time (which normally makes
sense) and I think it is even single threaded on transactions inside the
block.

To try to addresses these issues, I made my own implementation of the
electrum server.  It doesn't support UTXO (yet) but happily interacts with
all the clients I've tested.  It is heavily multithreaded, uses mongodb as
a key value store and bitcoinj for block and transaction parsing.

https://github.com/fireduck64/jelectrum

You can hit a running instance at:
b.1209k.com:50002:s
or
b.1209k.com:50001:t

A synced node uses 347G of mongodb storage.

Here are the recent blocks imported, with number of transactions and import
time.
http://pastebin.com/cfW3C2L6
These times are based on having mongodb on SSD.
The CPU is 8 core Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5430  @ 2.66GHz

I'd be happy to help with anything you need to evaluate it.


On Thu, Jul 23, 2015 at 9:01 AM Slurms MacKenzie via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> Similar to the Bitcoin Node Speed Test, this is a quick quantitative look
> at how the Electrum server software handles under load. The Electrum wallet
> is extremely popular, and the distributed servers which power it are all
> hosted by volunteers without budget. The server requires a fully indexed
> Bitcoin Core daemon running, and produces sizable external index in order
> to allow SPV clients to quickly retrieve their history.
>
>     3.9G    electrum/utxo
>     67M     electrum/undo
>     19G     electrum/hist
>     1.4G    electrum/addr
>     24G     electrum/
>
> Based on my own logs produced by the electrum-server console, it takes
> this server (Xeon, lots of memory, 7200 RPM RAID) approximately 3.7 minutes
> per megabyte of block to process into the index. This seems to hold true
> through the 10 or so blocks I have in my scroll buffer, the contents of
> blocks seem to be of approximately the same processing load. Continuing
> this trend with the current inter-block time of 9.8 minutes, an
> electrum-server instance running on modest-high end dedicated server is
> able to support up to 2.64 MB block sizes before permanently falling behind
> the chain.
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