Fetching receipts takes a bit long

[haseebrabbani]

first let me start by saying thank you for this awesome library used across the community ❤️ we recently switched over from web3.js to ethers.js primarily due to its much more compact size.

however, after this transition we noticed that fetching receipts (something we do a lot) was taking noticeably longer. we decided to do some benchmarking to compare fetching receipts using ethers.js, web3.js and plain old axios. you can view and verify the benchmarks located here (shoutout @emnul for helping with this).

this is what was observed for the amount of ms to fetch a receipt:

• web3.currentProvider.send took 245 ms
• web3.eth.getTransactionReceipt took 294 ms
• axios.post took 711 ms
• ethers.send took 736 ms
• ethers.getTransactionReceipt with JsonRpcBatchProvider took 1697 ms
• ethers.getTransactionRecipt with JsonRpcProvider took 1862 ms

on average, ethers.js is taking 3-6x longer than web3.js to fetch a receipt. we're wondering how this could be improved, or if there are optimizations that we are not using. any and all feedback is welcome 🙂

[ricmoo]

What happens if you use the StaticJsonRpcRovider? I’m not sure what could be eating up all that extra time, except that the base JsonRpcProvider validates chainId on each request.

[haseebrabbani]

just tried using StaticJsonRpcProvider, still takes about 900 ms

[haseebrabbani]

pinging on this again. i understand contributors may not be on the project fulltime, but i feel the performance drop measured here is significant enough to warrant a closer look. currently we are using ethers.send since we need the data in the raw format, but using StaticJsonRpcProvider does not seem to help with ethers.send