Devnet spawning is slowed down after introduction of another ERC20 artifact

[FabijanC]

Origin

The (slight) slowdown was introduced in #799.

Improvement proposals

1. Use a buffered reader
2. Serialize artifacts in a binary form
3. Use asynchronous/parallel loading - unlikely as it would require async propagation.

[FabijanC]

Improvement proposal research

Continuing on the proposals from the issue description.

1. Buffered reader makes no sense as the artifacts are already present in the program, although in string form, via include_str.
2. Tried using bincode: successfully compiled with a build.rs script, but loading the generated bincode artifacts failed on startup with:

Error: Types error: expected value at line 1 column 1

Caused by:
    expected value at line 1 column 1

3. Didn't try

[Abeeujah]

Hi @FabijanC can you please provide any more context? I see you listed a couple expectations on what could be done, but not very much on what/where should be investigated, looking at #799 it looks like more calls were made than previous, so this could/would definitely contribute to spawning being slowed down.

But if my take isn't right, I would need to learn or know more about this issue, to be able to resolve/fix it, Thank you.

[FabijanC]

In #799, a new smart contract artifact was introduced to the predeclaration/predeployment process (a new ERC20 smart contract). Ideally, we would come up with a more efficient way of loading these artifacts than what we have now. So this might be a complex task.

A similar slowdown can be noticed if Devnet is spawned with the --predeclare-argent flag, which doesn't predeploy, but predeclares Argent account.