Contracts method readonly calls are extremely slow

[teneko]

Hey, I am right now on switching from web3.js to ethers.js, because I heard it is better.

Previously I added all private keys via web3.eth.accounts.wallet.add(privateKey);
Now I instantiate one Wallet per private key and connect them to JsonRpcProvider.

Everythings is just fine. But the routine I have written for web3 is making 5 calls in under 1 second. But with the ethers.js it takes around 4 seconds. I just don't know why ethers.js is just so slow.

I am iterating over multiple wallets and do this routine and it is just a pain. I have researched everywhere and everythings regarding this topic. I tried the polling and pollingInterval settings of the JsonRpcProvider, or connected the wallet to the provider and returned this provider by getUncheckedSigner and passed this signer to the contract factory (that got generated by TypeChain).

Has anyone a slight inkling what causes the extremely bad call perfomance of ethers.js???

P.S: I use Binance Smart Chain and the public available RPC service (non-websocket).

[teneko]

I think I will just stick with web3.js for the moment, until I found out, what's the acutal problem with ethers.js.

[ricmoo]

Have you tried the JsonRpcBatchProvider? That will automatically lump all calls made within the same event loop into one call.

That said, there is no reason ethers should be any slower than Web3.js, they both execute the exact same operations.

I’ll have Provider support in the playground soon though, which will be useful for tracking which calls are going over the wire.

[teneko]

After looking closer to it, then I find only "to"-addresses that are contracts. these contracts are all belonging to the one and same ecosystem. but ethers would need to craw that many transactions to different contracts of the ecosystem (???) to dispatch my final readonly call. Is there a system implemented in ethers.js that has an automatic lookup for addresses for that reason it has to crawl transactions??

[ricmoo]

Ethers doesn’t do anything automatic. The only automatic thing it does for a provider, is if the chain is unknown, it looks it up. It definitely does not use any eth_call without being asked to. :)

[ricmoo]

Are you just using new Contract(address, abi, provider)? Are you using someone else’s wrapper around ethers? Hardhat and friends might do other random things. :)

[teneko]

Ohh, when you are talking about contract... I think I found the "problem". I have created a big function to initialize 10 contracts and more, where some of them are initialized by an address that are fetched dynamically.......... eth_call....... so each wallet is going through this function...... Men, I am sorry that I have annoyed you with this problem. Damn, this does not happen a lot to me to not see the wood for the trees. After testing here and there it just seems that ethers.js is only a little bit slower but much more stable and this is much more worth! :)

Thank you for your time!! I definitely can recommend ethers.js and will use it in further projects. :)

[ricmoo]

Phew. Glad we found it. No worries. Happy coding. ;)