I think discussing exactly how much throughput the subnet can handle is actually not all that relevant for the long term scalability story.
The cycles prices of using ICP should make sure that whenever a subnet is heavily loaded, it burns more cycles than node providers receive. Adjustments are being proposed to ensure this is always true (link). So in the long run, whenever the load on the existing subnets starts getting high, new subnets should be added, and it only adds to deflation, as every subnet burns more than in mints.
The caveat to this story now is that balancing load across subnets is difficult, so that is the main thing we want to address for long term scalability, as outlined in this post. But once that’s there:
- whenever we’d see increased latency on some subnets due to high load, but other subnets have less load, then canisters would migrate to balance the load
- if all subnets are highly loaded, it means a lot of cycles are being burned, so ICP holders are happy, and new subnets are added, and we go back to step 1.
So the challenges we’re seeing today are growing pains, but not fundamental issues that can’t be overcome.