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<a href=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_work>proof-of-work(PoW)</a> mechanism
to rate limit users or potential bots. In order for this to be
effective, the PoW should be configured properly. The difficulty
requirement can&rsquo;t be too high, as it could cause accessibility issues on
the client-side while at the same time, it shouldn&rsquo;t be too low, as it
wouldn&rsquo;t offer proper protection against bots.</p><p>Malicious bots(the ones that wreak havoc), run native code which is
capable of running in a multi-threaded context. This creates an unfair
advantage for crackers using these bots over legitimate users, who
usually | browsers to access a website. I wanted to see how much of
an advantage a native program would have over our WASM library.</p><h2 id=benchmark-tools>Benchmark tools</h2><p>So I wrote these to compare native and WASM performances:</p><ul><li>Browser benchmark: <a href=https://mCaptcha.github.io/benches>https://mCaptcha.github.io/benches</a></li><li>Native benchmark: <a href=https://github.com/mCaptcha/cli/blob/master/scripts/bench.sh>mCaptcha/cli managed by scripts/bench.sh</a></li></ul><div class="alert alert-warning d-flex" role=alert><div class="flex-shrink-1 alert-icon">⭐</div><div class=w-100>Feel free to reproduce the results!</div></div><h2 id=results>Results</h2><p>The tests were run on my development machine featuring an Intel Core
i7-9750h.</p><h3 id=native>Native</h3><table><thead><tr><th>Difficulty</th><th>Real</th><th>User</th><th>Sys</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>50000</td><td>0m0.040s</td><td>0m0.040s</td><td>0m0.000s</td></tr><tr><td>300000</td><td>0m0.122s</td><td>0m0.122s</td><td>0m0.000s</td></tr><tr><td>550000</td><td>0m0.124s</td><td>0m0.119s</td><td>0m0.003s</td></tr><tr><td>800000</td><td>0m0.123s</td><td>0m0.118s</td><td>0m0.003s</td></tr><tr><td>1050000</td><td>0m0.933s</td><td>0m0.932s</td><td>0m0.000s</td></tr><tr><td>1300000</td><td>0m1.227s</td><td>-</td><td>0m0.007s</td></tr><tr><td>1550000</td><td>0m1.260s</td><td>0m1.256s</td><td>0m0.003s</td></tr><tr><td>1800000</td><td>0m1.243s</td><td>0m1.242s</td><td>0m0.000s</td></tr><tr><td>2050000</td><td>0m2.524s</td><td>0m2.510s</td><td>0m0.000s</td></tr><tr><td>2300000</td><td>0m2.545s</td><td>0m2.543s</td><td>0m0.000s</td></tr><tr><td>2550000</td><td>0m2.561s</td><td>0m2.551s</td><td>0m0.004s</td></tr><tr><td>2800000</td><td>0m2.555s</td><td>0m2.540s</td><td>0m0.006s</td></tr><tr><td>3050000</td><td>0m2.513s</td><td>0m2.508s</td><td>0m0.000s</td></tr><tr><td>3300000</td><td>0m2.484s</td><td>0m2.481s</td><td>0m0.000s</td></tr><tr><td>3550000</td><td>0m2.643s</td><td>0m2.642s</td><td>0m0.000s</td></tr><tr><td>3800000</td><td>0m2.663s</td><td>0m2.661s</td><td>0m0.000s</td></tr><tr><td>4050000</td><td>0m2.663s</td><td>0m2.660s</td><td>0m0.000s</td></tr><tr><td>4300000</td><td>0m2.689s</td><td>0m2.683s</td><td>0m0.004s</td></tr><tr><td>4550000</td><td>0m2.688s</td><td>0m2.686s</td><td>0m0.000s</td></tr><tr><td>4800000</td><td>0m2.517s</td><td>0m2.509s</td><td>0m0.003s</td></tr></tbody></table><h3 id=browser>Browser</h3><p>I ran the tests on both Firefox and Chromium to compare results</p><h3 id=firefox>Firefox</h3><ul><li><strong>User Agent:</strong> <code>Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:91.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/91.0</code></li><li><strong>Hardware concurrency:</strong> 12</li></ul><table><thead><tr><th>Difficulty</th><th>Duration(in ms)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>500000</td><td>401</td></tr><tr><td>1000000</td><td>413</td></tr><tr><td>1500000</td><td>398</td></tr><tr><td>2000000</td><td>394</td></tr><tr><td>2500000</td><td>1495</td></tr><tr><td>3000000</td><td>1556</td></tr><tr><td>3500000</td><td>3971</td></tr><tr><td>4000000</td><td>4235</td></tr><tr><td>4500000</td><td>4116</td></tr></tbody></table><blockquote><p>To be fair, my Firefox installation is loaded with a gazillion
extensions while the Chromium instance is clean, as I don&rsquo;t use it
much</p></blockquote><h4 id=chromium>Chromium</h4><ul><li><strong>User Agent:</strong> <code>Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/92.0.4515.159 Safari/537.36</code></li><li><strong>Hardware concurrency:</strong> 12</li></ul><table><thead><tr><th>Difficulty</th><th>Duration(in ms)</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>500000</td><td>399.40000000037253</td></tr><tr><td>1000000</td><td>354.6000000014901</td></tr><tr><td>1500000</td><td>351.19999999925494</td></tr><tr><td>2000000</td><td>353.80000000074506</td></tr><tr><td>2500000</td><td>1337.800000000745</td></tr><tr><td>3000000</td><td>1311.199999999255</td></tr><tr><td>3500000</td><td>3417.5999999996275</td></tr><tr><td>4000000</td><td>3488.800000000745</td></tr><tr><td>4500000</td><td>3458.2999999988824</td></tr></tbody></table><h2 id=conclusion>Conclusion</h2><p>At the highest difficulty factor, the native implementation was a almost second
faster than the WASM library. But the fact that both of them were able
to run to completion in under 5 seconds is impressive.</p><p>So, in my opinion, native implementation is only slightly faster than
the WASM library and for all intents and purposes, this shouldn&rsquo;t matter
much.</p></article><div class="docs-navigation d-flex justify-content-between"><a class=ms-auto href=/blog/say-hello-to-mcaptcha/><div class="card my-1"><div class="card-body py-2">Say hello to mCaptcha &rarr;</div></div></a></div><p class=edit-page><a href=https://github.com/mCaptcha/website/blob/master/content/blog/pow-performance/index.md><svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="16" height="16" viewBox="0 0 24 24" fill="none" stroke="currentcolor" stroke-width="2" stroke-linecap="round" stroke-linejoin="round" class="feather feather-edit-2"><path d="M17 3a2.828 2.828.0 114 4L7.5 20.5 2 22l1.5-5.5L17 3z"/></svg>Edit this page on GitHub</a></p></main></div></div></div><footer class="footer text-muted"><div class=container><div class=row><div class="col-lg-8 order-last order-lg-first"><ul class=list-inline><li class=list-inline-item>Powered by <a href=https://gohugo.io/>Hugo</a>, and <a href=https://getdoks.org/>Doks</a></li></ul></div><div class="col-lg-8 order-first order-lg-last text-lg-end"><ul class=list-inline><li class=list-inline-item><a href=/about/>About</a></li><li class=list-inline-item><a href=/donate>Donate</a></li><li class=list-inline-item><a href=/privacy-policy/>Privacy</a></li><li class=list-inline-item><a href=/security>Security</a></li><li class=list-inline-item><a href=https://stats.uptimerobot.com/GK7VLFJnBl>Status</a></li><li class=list-inline-item><a href=/thanks>Thanks</a></li></ul></div></div></div></footer><script src=/main.min.db67f0caa6a5788b691b9509981d6e5943f4b8d829170a674f468d4b23671ce4017c47a0a22116a8fc2f2de556c8b48f1afecd86707066f2f022c5dd83e8ea3c.js integrity="sha512-22fwyqaleItpG5UJmB1uWUP0uNgpFwpnT0aNSyNnHOQBfEegoiEWqPwvLeVWyLSPGv7NhnBwZvLwIsXdg+jqPA==" crossorigin=anonymous defer></script><script src=/index.min.aab62a01bb69c52990d1e9a9072a01da2b9367f1a41ff3fa2b71ccdec4240b589f7196886485c3dd15f0598e76f83630d9f9432840f1758143eb96b263dcbe1e.js integrity="sha512-qrYqAbtpxSmQ0empByoB2iuTZ/GkH/P6K3HM3sQkC1ifcZaIZIXD3RXwWY52+DYw2flDKEDxdYFD65ayY9y+Hg==" crossorigin=anonymous defer></script></body></html>