As many of you know I've been running the v4v.app for a good long while now and I've become Hive's leading Lightning Expert (at least according to @blocktrades on a recent Core Dev call).

One of the things I track is how long each transaction takes on my system: Hive to Lightning and Lightning to Hive.

And it's pretty clear which way is quicker and when you find out how Lightning works, you understand what makes Lightning slower than Hive, but unpredictable as well.

This graph is a histogram of the number of seconds it took to complete a total of 518 transfers from Hive to Lightning and 153 back the other way.

The tall blue tower on the left are the payments of Lightning to Hive, these happen with a mean speed of 3.1s and 90% are complete in under 4s.

The spread out red bars are payments to various Lightning destinations. The mean speed is 215s though 90% of the transactions complete in 30s.

The Lightning speeds are significantly corrupted by a very few slow transactions:

That's right, the slowest transaction I have (which actually did succeed) took 22 hours, 23 minutes, and 25 seconds. The next slowest was almost 4 1/2 hours. These skew the Lightning results quite a bit.

The slowest payment to Hive was 11s and was actually caused by a networking issue with my equipment rather than anything to do with Hive inherently.

There were 21 payments to Lightning which were impossible to make and for which all Hive funds were returned. Payment failure son Lightning happen for various reasons but insufficient liquidity at the receiving end is the biggest reason for me. There's nothing much I can do about this. Most of the payments my system makes are to major wallets and these nearly always succeed (though in the case of Muun wallet payments can take a very long time if the user closes their app).