Block size is an important indicator of blockchain activity and performance, with Steem blocks passing 4 millions now, I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look to the block size evolution over the past few months.
Our first chart is a semi-logarithmic chart of overall block size, highlighting the min, average and max block sizes recorded since the first block.
Overall daily block size (in bytes)
| Min | 115 bytes |
| Avg | 489 bytes |
| Max | 1697403 bytes |
| Deviation | 7678 bytes |
Other than the obvious growth in the average block size which is a good indicator that posting have been more active lately, we notice also that some blocks are still empty, which indicates that we are nowhere near congestion levels, and the blockchain is still handling the quantity of data very well, even during the peaks to 1.69 mb block size reached during the last spam attack.
Another important thing is that the reduction of block size to mitigate this kind of attacks have successfully limited the max size to 65 kb, which we can see is now the max size in the latest blocks.
In our next chart, we take a look at the cumulative linear block size:
Overall daily cumulative block size (in bytes)
In this chart we can see that there is a definitive increase of block size growth over the past two weeks, which confirms steemers have been very active posting lately. The current total size of blocks is around 2 gb, which has doubled since July, 22th.
Our last chart highlights the block size recorded in the past week:
Last week's hourly block size (in bytes)
| Min | 115 bytes |
| Avg | 1322 bytes |
| Max | 65353 bytes |
| Deviation | 2002 bytes |
In this chart, we can see that the block size is now stabilized around an average of 1.3 kb with spikes to the max block size and also dips to the min size. The deviation also went down, which indicates more blocks are close to the median size.
In conclusion, we can see that steem blockchain has successfully supported an important block size increase, and does seem to be ready for much more, as we still have many empty blocks.
The increase of the average block size itself is also an indicator of the growth in activity, which correlates with the growth in users.