I’ve been working on optimizing the gas cost for deploying a smart contract. Turns out truffle has some pretty useful ways of estimating gas used.
Good Old Migrate
The most obvious way is to just run $ truffle migrate and see what the output says. When the project has quite a large build this can take some time so it’s not that efficient for seeing the difference some code changes make. I do find it useful to run this every now and again though just to confirm the estimates are correct.
estimateGas()
The other way I found useful is to use the estimateGas function. As is pretty self explanatory it is just an estimate and could change depending on the contract state. I found this was nice and quick to use on a truffle cli and I found two useful estimations to look at:
Contract deployment
Start the local ganache with a large gas limit:
$ ganache-cli --gasLimit 10000000 --allowUnlimitedContractSize
Start a truffle cli that connects to above chain:
$ truffle console
Estimate gas for deploying your contract:
truffle(develop)> YourContract.new.estimateGas()
Calling Contract Method
Start with the same set-up steps as above. Then:
truffle(develop)> YourContract.testMethod.estimateGas()
And that’s it – another useful trick!