Ethereum RPC API

Question

I am building an analytics dash for wallets, which constantly tracks balance changes for wallets. I am using this small snippet to get the balance

(async () => {
  const provider = new ethers.JsonRpcProvider("https://some-rpc-url");
  const balance = await provider.getBalance(
    "wallet",
    "latest"
  );
  console.log(balance);
})(); 

The data is time sensitive, as the balances of the wallets I am tracking keep changing constantly. It is very important for me to get the data as quickly as possible from the blockchain. Have been seeing a lot of conflicting information on the blockchain where each RPC provider is the fastest, so which one is the fastest? How can I pick?

Answer 1

Though latency usually depends on a lot of factors but from a perspective of an RPC provider, latency always depends on the following factors:

• Distance between your machine and node
• Node configurartion
• Node's load balancing capabilities.

We at QuickNode have done in-depth research to compare major RPC providers by considering the above and a few more points. The overall result states that QuickNode is the fastest provider in all the regions (USA, EU, Asia-pacific).

Checkout the live speed comparison dashboards here:https://p.datadoghq.com/sb/60jawonjq8itpora-4b1fe8f5bc59552872b48d022321f0b4

For more in-depth reading, check this blog post: https://blog.quicknode.com/justifying-quick-in-quicknode-response-time-comparison-of-various-blockchain-node-providers/

Answer 2

200ms for the TCP call is OK. It depends of many obstacles - your network connection, latency, you RPC node location, performance. But in general 200ms for the cold request is OK. If you make many request, then connection reusage would reduce the request time. If your RPC node is running on the same machine, you could use the IPC transport instead.