Proponent: Subsquid Lab Official - FAyqRVLZmXVUU9pNeG8w8SxS5xRgN8FRGeWLL6u9S32TMHc

Short description: Ongoing costs for the running of high performance, scalable, and reliable data indexing infrastructure for most of the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystem (and growing).

Raw data: Archive Infrastructure metrics - July, August, September

Requested KSM: 1,340.48 KSM

Previous proposal:

https://kusama.polkassembly.io/treasury/171

https://polkadot.polkassembly.io/treasury/134

Motivation

Archives are an important piece of Polkadot and Kusama data infrastructure provided by Subsquid. They provide access to on-chain data in GraphQL format for all major parachains on Kusama and Polkadot, with more chains getting support as the ecosystem grows. They are being used as a data source for Squids and for efficient data exploration and ad-hoc queries. An up-to-date list of Archives is kept in a public Archive Registry

Achievements

At the end of Q2 Subsquid released a new generation of Archives, together with a major version of the SDK, both code named “Fire Squid”. The improvements brought by this release include:

• Substantial performance increase, with the ability to deploy a new Archive for a chain as big as Kusama, and the indexing to be ready in roughly a day
• Fire Squid Archives support batch requests, which lead to a hundredfold increase in performance of indexing project connecting to them (squids)
• Fire Squid Archives expose two separate gateways, configured and tuned for different uses (one for data exploration by humans, the other one specifically for programmatic and batch access)
• Fire Squid Archives “unwrap” proxy, sudo and batch calls, tracing the origin, but making them much easier to access them Subsquid has also engaged in continuously improving the product, iteratively working on adding features, such as EVM Transactions indexing, and subscriptions to queries in the Graphql endpoints of indexing projects created with the Subsquid SDK (commonly called squids).

Statistics

Between 2022-09-03 (when tracking has started) and 2022-09-30 Subsquid’s Archive infrastructure has collectively:

• Served a total of 129,468,038.2 (~129 million) queries in the month of September alone
• Our 7 day average peaks above 5 million queries and adjusts around 3.3 million queries per day at the end of the period Data from the month of October confirms the linear trend, allowing us to make assumptions for the months of July and August, given the steady growth of queries over time shown.

Full report here