Solana outages have been quite prevalent in recent months. The network is occasionally paused to address faults. The mainnet, for example, was hit by nondeterminism on June 1, preventing the network from progressing further.
For several hours, the network’s validators did not process fresh blocks, and as a result, Solana’s blockchain-based applications were pulled offline. The problem was rectified, and the network was back online within a few hours.
As a result of the frequent network halts, the team decided to disable the feature causing the outages.
So no more Solana network halts?
The action taken by the team might be the initial step toward stopping the network outages. The last outage was on May 1, 2022, when the network was down for almost seven hours before being successfully restored. The last disruption was purportedly triggered by a rush in transactions.
The recent stalled consensus was caused by a bug in the nonce transactions feature. After the bug was disabled, the network was restarted after four and a half hours. The instance was triggered by a runtime bug that caused a failed nonce transaction to be double processed. This eventually led to nondeterminism, causing the validators to process a transaction a second time, and a few nodes rejected the subsequent block when the others accepted it.
It is well known that Solana has been branded an Ethereum-killer. However, if network problems persist and worsen over time, people will begin to flee. As a result, it may wind up killing itself.
The durable nonce transaction feature has been disabled in the v1.9.28/v1.10.23 release to avoid any such situation. In case a similar situation arises, the disabled feature will prevent the network from halting. The team also announced that the durable nonce transactions won’t process until further mitigations are applied in the next release.