Would the performance of the Algorand network start to degrade after a certain amount of nodes (either participation or relay) are active? If so, what are the approximate details?
The sortition mechanism ensures that at each step only a couple of thousand of nodes (chosen randomly with the help of the VRF) need to actively participate. This is a fundamental innovation of Algorand. This ensures that there should be no significant performance degradation even for millions of nodes.
Read more here: https://algorand.foundation/algorand-protocol/core-blockchain-innovation
There might still be some small performance impact at the pure networking layer (due to higher bandwidth requirements or higher number of hops in the relay network) if there are a lot more nodes. I am really not an expert on this question but my guess is that it should not be significant assuming the relays are scaled accordingly.
Thank you. Just to clarify, would the answer be the same if asking about increasing # of relay nodes?
That is, Would the performance of the Algorand network start to degrade after a certain amount of relay nodes are active? If so, what are the approximate details?
Relay nodes do not participate in consensus so it should not have significant impact.
Moreover relay nodes are more expensive than participation nodes (high bandwidth requirements) so we should never see an explosion of the number of relay nodes (and for now they are whitelisted).