Payment Transaction taking 6 seconds

Question

Using the SDK and making very basic payments from one wallet to another with a digital asset. The issue is that every transaction that is made takes 6 seconds from call to response from the SDK. Anyone have some insight as to why this could be? The network can process 1000-5000 transactions per second so really confused on why we are encountering the long response times. Code example below.

async transfer(asset: StellarSDK.Asset, fromPubKey: string, fromSecretKey: string, toPubKey: string, amount: string): Promise<StellarSDK.Horizon.SubmitTransactionResponse> {
        const server = this._createServer()

        const res = await server.loadAccount(fromPubKey)
        const seqId = res.sequenceNumber().toString()
        const issuer = new StellarSDK.Account(fromPubKey, seqId)

        const tx = new StellarSDK.TransactionBuilder(issuer, {
            fee: StellarSDK.BASE_FEE,
            networkPassphrase: this.networkPassphrase
        })
            .addOperation(StellarSDK.Operation.payment({
                destination: toPubKey,
                asset: asset,
                amount
            }))
            .setTimeout(WAITING_TIME)
            .build()

        tx.sign(StellarSDK.Keypair.fromSecret(fromSecretKey))

        return this._submitTx(tx)
    }

Answer 1

One ledger takes close to ~5.5s on average. As of September 2021 there is around 200 transactions processed per ledger, which gives around 35 txs per second. That is current rate and nodes settings can be changed to process more if required. Time will tell how it scales up.

Due to ledger time your 6 seconds from call to response is as expected.