Relation between the number of block and transaction rate in Quorum

Question

I want to know the relation between the number of blocks generated and the transaction send rate in quorum. I did some experiments on quorum with RAFT consensus, and I get (I invoked the same function of a deployed smart contract in each workload)

10 blocks for 10 transaction send rate

7 blocks for 20 transaction send rate

21 blocks for 30 transaction send rate

21 blocks for 50 transaction send rate

20 blocks for 100 transaction send rate

23 blocks for 200 transaction send rate

156 blocks for 1000 transaction send rate

I can't determine the logic for blocks generation with relation to the transaction send rate

Answer 1

By default, Quorum in Raft mode attempts to create blocks every 50ms but only if a pending txn exists. It is rate limited (and is controlled by a cli parameter), so if 2 txns made it into the queue between the block minting, then both of these txns will get minted in the next block; by extension, if you were able to send 1000 txns between the mint time, they would all go into the next block.

This is a very well documented topic with full detail here: https://github.com/jpmorganchase/quorum/blob/master/raft/doc.md