RPC Showdown: Amazon Managed Blockchain C5.4xlarge vs. M5.4xlarge

CompareNodes provides independent and transparent RPC benchmarking services for blockchain nodes and endpoints. Our default regions are North America, Europe and Asia.

On February 3rd, 2025 we benchmarked AWS’ Managed Blockchain service for Ethereum mainnet. AWS offers 6 sizes and our goal was to determine the peak RPC capacity for the 4 larger instance types: c5.4xlarge, m5.4xlarge, c5.2xlarge and m5.2xlarge. Instances range in size from 4 vCPU & 16GB to 16 vCPU & 64 GB which is why we have arranged their results in pairs by the count of vCPUs (see each table below).

Our definition for Peak RPC Capacity = max RPC requests per second and 100% successes (no fails, no timeouts).

In total, we dispatched ~8 million RPC requests. You can learn more about our methodology and use cases for RPC benchmarking-as-a-service.

Benchmarking Configuration

Configs were almost identical for all runs:

  • k6 running on EC2 c5.9xlarge;
  • Ethereum mainnet in AWS US-East-1;
  • Target RPC-scenarios/second: 3000 or 5000. 
  • 10 stages: 10% increase until 100% (of target RPC-scenarios/second);
  • Each stage consist of 2 phases: 30 seconds ramp-up and 60 seconds sustain;
  • Total duration: 15 minutes;
  • Timeouts: 10 seconds.

Our assumption was that a “8 vCPU” instance might have a similar capacity as another “8 vCPU” instance and both might have much lower capacity than a “16 vCPU” instance. Therefore, we used different values for the Target RPC-scenarios/second depending on the instance vCPU count.

RPC Scenarios & RPC Requests

Our “RPC-scenarios” correspond to 23 popular RPC methods. A target config of “1000” will run 1000 RPC-scenarios per second but will dispatch more than 1000 RPC requests per second because some RPC scenarios dispatch additional 1 or 2 RPC requests on each cycle. Additional RPC requests are for eth_blockNumber/eth_getBlockByNumber because scenarios “follow” the top of the chain during the course of the benchmark run and send “auxiliary” RPC requests to obtain new values for their dynamic parameters.

For this analysis we used 23 RPC scenarios like eth_call and eth_getLogs. In each case, we assigned them a weight to mimic a realistic usage distribution (example). Since Amazon Managed Blockchain does not support “batching” at this time, we set it to”0.0” and increased eth_getLogs to “0.0535” instead.

Each benchmarking run computes various metrics for every scenario as well as all scenarios and requests as a whole. In the tables below, we show a subset of latencies for a subset of scenarios with highest weight values. However, you can navigate to corresponding dashboards in Grafana to explore complete results.

Showdown Results

One of our goals was to determine the approximate peak RPC capacity-without-fails for each instance type. These values are shown as “Breaking points” in the tables below. Also, we show a latencies for 5 of the most frequent RPC scenarios: eth_call, eth_blockNumber, eth_getBalance, eth_getTransactionReceipt and eth_getLogs. Complete latencies by method are in the screenshots on the bottom of the page.

C5.4xlarge vs. M5.4xlarge

Our findings are that C5’s greater clock speed beats M5’s larger memory for RPC processing. Over the course of ~2.5 million requests, M5 “fails” about twice as much as the C5 instance. Moreover, the C5 is able to run at 100% successes up to about 4.65k requests/sec: see “breaking point” and screenshots below or open the Grafana dashboard link to 23 panels.

Amazon Managed Blockchain
C5.4xlarge
Amazon Managed Blockchain
M5.4xlarge
Grafana Dashboard23 panels23 panels
vCPU1616
RAM GB3264
Target RPC-scenarios/sec50005000
Peak RPC requests/sec5.17 k5.21 k
Total RPC requests2.51 mil2.52 mil
Fails Pct3.21%6.33%
Timeouts Pct0%0%
Successes Pct96.79%93.67%
“Breaking” point:
Peak RPC requests/sec
4.64 k RPC/sec3.87 k RPC/sec
Overall Latencies 23 methods
Median
p95

22.3 ms
153 ms

29.4 ms
191 ms
eth_call: 33%
Median
p95

20.7 ms
117 ms

25 ms
152 ms
eth_blockNumber: 21%
Median
p95

20.5 ms
114 ms

24.5 ms
147 ms
eth_getBalance: 8.15%
Median
p95

20.6 ms
118 ms

24.7 ms
153 ms
eth_getTransactionReceipt: 7%
Median
p95

21.4 ms
116 ms

26 ms
150 ms
eth_getLogs: 5.35%
Median
p95

132 ms
512 ms

155 ms
678 ms

C5.4xlarge breaking-point is the peak requests/sec before fails/timeouts: ~4.64 k

While M5.4xlarge starts failing ~3.87 k

C5.2xlarge vs. M5.2xlarge

In the case of the 2 instance types with 8 vCPUs, we see that C5 holds a performance edge over the M5 again. Also, we can compare them to their respective 4xlarge “siblings” and see that scaling works well. Doubling vCPUs from 8 to 16 achieves an increase from 2.53 k breaking-point to 4.64 k breaking-point which is ~1.83x for C5 and ~1.9x for M5 series.

Amazon Managed Blockchain
C5.2xlarge
Amazon Managed Blockchain
M5.2xlarge
Grafana Dashboard23 panels23 panels
vCPU88
RAM GB1632
Target RPC-scenarios/sec30003000
Peak RPC requests/sec3.19 k 3.21 k 
Total RPC requests1.55 mil1.56 mil
Fails Pct10.06%16.15%
Timeouts Pct0%0%
Successes Pct89.94%83.85%
“Breaking” point:
Peak RPC requests/sec
2.53 k RPC/sec2.04 k RPC/sec
Overall Latencies 23 methods
Median
p95

27.7 ms
333 ms

41.1 ms
448 ms
eth_call: 33%
Median
p95

11.6 ms
287 ms

33.7 ms
370 ms
eth_blockNumber: 21%
Median
p95

23.6 ms
278 ms

32.8 ms
355 ms
eth_getBalance: 8.15%
Median
p95

23.7 ms
288 ms

33.6 ms
376 ms
eth_getTransactionReceipt: 7%
Median
p95

24.3 ms
281 ms

34.3 ms
363 ms
eth_getLogs: 5.35%
Median
p95

133 ms
1.36 s

207 ms
1.82 s

C5.2xlarge peaks without fails at ~2.53 k RPC requests / sec

… and M5.2xlarge achieves ~2.04 k RPC requests/sec before any fails:

Schedule Your Benchmark

This article is an example of our RPC benchmarking service. Additional data is available in private Grafana and we can publish it on multiple platforms, upon your request.

Please get in touch with our CTO Simon to schedule a consultation about your own private or public benchmark via this Calendly link. Alternatively, learn more about our setup process & steps.

Scenarios For 23 RPC Methods

Amazon Managed Blockchain C5.4xlarge

Amazon Managed Blockchain M5.4xlarge

Amazon Managed Blockchain C5.2xlarge

Amazon Managed Blockchain M5.2xlarge

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