Feat/issue 167 gas benchmarking

[uzochukwuV]

Closes #167

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Summary

• Implements a comprehensive gas usage benchmarking suite for all TeachLink contract operations, addressing issue No Performance Benchmarking #167 (No Performance Benchmarking)
• Adds automated CI/CD pipeline for performance regression detection on every PR
• Establishes gas thresholds, baseline tracking, and regression detection policies

Changes

Gas Benchmark Tests (contracts/teachlink/tests/test_gas_benchmarks.rs)

• 14 gas benchmark tests covering: initialize, add_validator, add_supported_chain, set_bridge_fee, read_queries, cache_compute, cache_hit, register_validator, mint_content_token, transfer_content_token, send_notification, create_audit_record, initialize_mobile_profile, and a regression report
• Each test measures CPU instruction cost and asserts against a per-operation threshold
• Gas measurement uses Soroban budget tracking

Thresholds & Baselines

• gas_thresholds.json - Defines max instructions, memory bytes, and WASM size limits for every operation category (bridge, cache, consensus, tokenization, rewards, messaging, notifications, mobile, audit)
• gas_baseline.json - Tracks baseline gas usage for regression comparison (10% critical, 5% warning)

CI/CD Automation (.github/workflows/performance.yml)

• Runs on push to main and PRs touching contracts/**, gas_thresholds.json, or gas_baseline.json
• Builds WASM binary and checks size against 300 KB threshold
• Runs gas benchmarks and generates reports
• Comments PR with benchmark results table
• Fails on critical regressions

Supporting Scripts

• scripts/run_gas_benchmarks.py - Parses benchmark output, compares with baseline, generates JSON reports
• scripts/benchmark.sh - Local development benchmark runner with WASM size checks
• testing/performance/benchmark_runner.rs - Extended with GasBenchmarkResult tracking, threshold comparison, and baseline diffing

Test Results

All 14 gas benchmarks pass with operations well within thresholds:

Operation	Gas Used	Threshold	Status
initialize	2,001	500,000	PASS
add_validator	34,454	200,000	PASS
add_supported_chain	34,539	200,000	PASS
set_bridge_fee	31,969	150,000	PASS
read_queries_bundle	623	100,000	PASS
compute_and_cache_bridge_summary	44,510	1,500,000	PASS
get_cached_bridge_summary	0	200,000	PASS
register_validator	95,212	500,000	PASS
mint_content_token	130,186	600,000	PASS
transfer_content_token	50,761	500,000	PASS
send_notification	38,679	350,000	PASS
create_audit_record	46,691	400,000	PASS
initialize_mobile_profile	306,883	400,000	PASS

Acceptance Criteria

• Implement performance benchmarking suite
• Add gas usage benchmarks
• Monitor performance over time (baseline tracking)
• Set performance regression thresholds
• Automate performance testing (GitHub Actions)

[github-actions]

⚠️ PR Title Format

Please update your PR title to follow the conventional commit format:

type(scope): description

Types: feat, fix, docs, style, refactor, test, chore, perf, ci, build, revert

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• feat(contract): add learning reward distribution
• fix(escrow): resolve timeout calculation bug
• docs: update contributing guidelines

See CONTRIBUTING.md for details.

[github-actions]

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