## 6 Experimental Results
### Experiment Steps
#### 6.3 Performance Metrics Collected  
To ensure a comprehensive evaluation of the VoteChain system, the following key performance metrics were collected during the performance testing:  
* **Time to Complete Transactions**: This metric represents the average time taken to complete a voting transaction, from initiation to confirmation on the blockchain.  
**Result**: Figure 22 illustrates the response time across different user loads, highlighting the system's ability to maintain quick transaction processing even as the number of users increases. The system maintained an average transaction time of 1.5 s with up to 50,000 concurrent users. When the number of users increased to 100,000, the transaction time slightly rose to 2.2 s. These results indicate that the system can process transactions quickly, even under significant load, ensuring a smooth voting experience during high-demand periods.  
* **System Uptime**: This metric measures the percentage of time the system remained operational and accessible to users throughout the testing period.  
**Result**: Figure 23 shows the system uptime percentage during maximum load conditions, emphasizing VoteChain's reliability. VoteChain achieved an impressive uptime of 99.98% during the test, with only brief and negligible downtimes occurring during peak load conditions. This high level of availability is critical for maintaining voter trust and ensuring that the system is reliable during an election.  
* **Network Latency**: Network latency refers to the delay experienced in network communication between users' devices and the VoteChain server, measured in milliseconds.  
**Result**: Figure 24 details the latency experienced by users during the test, indicating that the system provides timely responses under various load conditions. The network latency averaged 120 milliseconds under baseline conditions and peaked at 250 milliseconds during maximum load. Despite the increased load, the latency remained within acceptable limits, ensuring that users could interact with the system in near real-time without noticeable delays.  
* **Transactions Per Second (TPS)**: TPS is a crucial metric that indicates the number of voting transactions the system can process per second, reflecting its throughput capacity.  
**Result**: Figure 25 depicts the TPS scaling with the number of users, demonstrating VoteChain's capacity to handle high transaction volumes during peak periods. The system demonstrated the ability to handle a TPS of 750 during moderate loads, which scaled up to 1200 TPS under heavy load conditions. This shows that VoteChain can efficiently manage a large number of transactions during peak voting periods, meeting the demands of a national election.  
Figure 23: VoteChain system uptime.  
Figure 22: Response time of VoteChain system.  
* **Error Rates**: This metric tracks the frequency and type of errors encountered during the voting process, including failed transactions and system crashes.  
**Result**: Figure 26 shows the error rates during the voting process under different system loads. The graph illustrates that as the load on the system increases, the error rate also slightly increases but remains exceptionally low, with a maximum error rate of 2% at the highest load. This demonstrates the VoteChain system's resilience and ability to maintain high performance and reliability even under stress. Error rates remained exceptionally low,  
Figure 24: Network latency.  
Figure 25: Transactions Per Second (TPS).  
with only 0.02% of transactions failing under maximum load. These isolated failures were primarily due to network congestion and were quickly resolved, having minimal impact on the overall system performance.