[Ethereum] How big could a contract be

contract-deploymentcontract-designgassolidity

I am trying to figure out how big could a contract be? Is it possible to have 10k functions? One million? More?

Is there any restriction on the function's body size?

Does a bigger contract need more gas to be deployed?

Is a bigger contract slower than a smaller one?

Best Answer

Solidity contracts are compiled to EVM bytecode. Contract bytecode costs 200 gas per byte of bytecode, and since block gas limit is 8 million right now, you could theoretically get a ~40,000 (a little less since there's extra for deployment/tx data) byte contract deployed. It's unlikely that you'd be able to create a contract this size though since blocks don't usually have that much extra space already. Regarding execution speed, this is totally dependent on your implementation.

Edit: As pointed out be @Ismael, there's actually a 32kb limit per transaction as explained here. That page also says there's also a 24576 byte limit for contract size, so I stand corrected! The EIP for the contract byte limit can be found here.

Edit2: If you're looking for a formal explanation for the contract size limit, check out definition 97 of the yellow paper:

That is, the output size of the final body code must not be bigger than 24576 bytes.

Related Solutions

[Ethereum] Contract code size (and how to work around it?)

Most probably the bytecode bloat comes from the new statements in your code. They're often the trouble maker because they include the code of the contract to be instantiated. You can create contract factories which you can deploy in front. This way you can reduce the bytecode size of your main contract.

E.g.

contract X {}

contract XFactory {
    function createX() returns (X) {
        return new X();
    }
}

contract Main {
    XFactory xFactory;
    ...
    Main(XFactory _xFactory) {
        xFactory = _xFactory;
    }
    ...
    function someMethod() {
        X x = xFactory.create();
    }
    ...
}

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Ethereum] Contract code size (and how to work around it?)

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