Choice of Ethereum Clients for Private Blockchain: Assessment from Proof of Authority Perspective

Enterprises are realizing their distributed ledger use-cases with private blockchains as it is more secure, efficient, and reliable compared to the public networks. Due to this reason we evaluate the behavior and performance of Ethereum clients namely Geth, OpenEthereum (Parity), and Hyperledger Besu along with their Proof of Authority consensus algorithms from an enterprise perspective. We propose a testing methodology adapted to Microsoft Azure Cloud infrastructure overcoming the drawbacks of existing works. We analyze the behavior in each of the clients from different Ethereum focused parameters. We propose a novel load-balancer middleware specific to Ethereum and integrate in our test tool for uniform and reliable distribution of transactions. We analyze the bottlenecks and their root causes in each of the clients and report it to the community.