Solana Developers Address Network Congestion Challenges

Developers at Solana are seeking solutions to tackle network congestion, though this will take time, according to Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

dealing with congestion bugs sucks so much more than total liveness failure. the latter is one and done, bug is identified and patched and chain continues. the former has to go through the full release and test pipeline. shipping fast is impossible ???

— toly ?? (@aeyakovenko) April 5, 2024

In February, a team of experts led by journalist Colin Wu concluded that the periodic outages in the network were due to its inability to handle the growing volume of transactions. On February 6, the protocol failed to process blocks for nearly five hours, marking yet another incident in recent years.

“Dealing with congestion bugs is much more frustrating than a complete liveness failure. In the latter case, it’s one and done; the bug is identified and fixed, and the chain continues. In the former, the full release and testing pipeline must be completed. Shipping fast is impossible,” Yakovenko wrote.

In recent weeks, the blockchain has faced a significant number of failed transactions, acknowledged Solana Foundation’s Head of Technology and Product, Matt Sorg. He attributed this to the meme token boom and significant growth in trading volumes on DEX within the ecosystem.

https://t.co/bsVVfaiGWG

— Matt Sorg ? (@tamgros) April 5, 2024

Sorg compared Solana’s architecture to the internet, where individual validators in the blockchain function similarly to endpoints like websites and servers, which must withstand extreme loads.

In Solana’s mechanism, the network sends transactions directly to block leaders, bypassing an intermediary model like a mempool, the expert noted. A surge of spam transactions could have overloaded the system, causing delays, he suggested.

“In this process, Solana encountered an issue where users lack a reliable way to include transactions in blocks. The existing fee and transaction systems, based on staking shares, are not designed,” Sorg stated.

According to him, “known solutions exist.” Their implementation will begin in the coming days, although any technical aspects require time, the expert added.

Solana Foundation strategist Austin Federa confirmed Sorg’s information about the plans for updates. He noted that the network “is once again being tested under a huge influx of traffic.”

The Solana network is, once again, being battle tested with a huge influx of traffic. Bug fixes are rolling out over the next week, and things will start to improve.

But there is no silver bullet and no “finished” – we expect demand will continue to increase, which will require…

— Austin Federa | ?? (@Austin_Federa) April 5, 2024

“But there is no ‘silver bullet’ and no ‘finished’ solution. We expect demand will continue to grow. This will require additional efforts to scale systems to meet it,” the expert warned.

The Anza team, behind the Solana client Agave, has already tested a patch aimed at mitigating the network congestion issue. Developers announced new improvements and updates in the coming months.

1/ Timelines and what to expect around what @anza_xyz is doing to address the current network congestion on @Solana in our validator client implementation, Agave.

The short version is: significant progress has been made to overcome the current congestion challenges, and we…

— Anza (@anza_xyz) April 5, 2024

Since the beginning of the year, Solana has accounted for 49.3% of global investor interest in blockchain ecosystems, according to CoinGecko.

According to Matty Taylor, co-founder of Colosseum and former head of growth at Solana Foundation, the network is predicted to surpass Ethereum in the number of consumer Web3 applications.