Hydra Replay Measures 1.9-Fold Gain on Midnight Claim Workload

Input Output’s Oct. 22 Hydra replay measured 79 claims per second on a Midnight workload, nearly 1.9 times the rate on version 0.22.4, while leaving Cardano mainnet capacity untested.

The replay used 24,576 transactions from Input Output’s claim pipeline. Each transaction ran three Plutus scripts, with real scripts and signatures applied to generated allotments. Processing the full set took 339.1 seconds on the current version, compared with 590.4 seconds on version 0.22.4. The reported time to settle one claim fell from 9.9 seconds to 4.4 seconds.

Each version was tested three times in alternating order on the same host. No run differed by more than 3% from that version’s median result.

A separate test using a single script that did nothing showed a 3.3-fold gap between versions. Sharan Konerira, author of the report, wrote, “For a workload like ours, with real validation in every transaction, 1.9 times is the honest number.”

Hydra Heads process transactions among their participants off-chain, then settle the result on Cardano. This replay tested a specific claim workload on one host; it does not establish how a distributed Head or Cardano mainnet would perform with other workloads.