Two weeks after the Solana network suffered a 7-hour outage, a significant upgrade designed to prevent the blockchain network from congestion is being rolled out.
Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, under the pseudonym ‘aeyakovenko’, dropped a status update on the v1.10.15 testnet codebase in GitHub, designed to tackle congestion issues and improve transaction processes on the network. The upgrade is expected to be rolled out to the Mainnet this week.
“There is a pretty rudimentary implementation of QoS that should prevent unstaked or staked bots from eating up all the bandwidth.”
The platform’s fee prioritization mechanism also became active, allowing users to jump ahead of the pack to get their transactions approved. However, Yakovenko added that the network needs time to ensure that this improvement does not increase fees for all participants.
What is the ELI5 Solana congestion?
In an earlier post, Yakovenko explored congestion issues on the Solana network and why user transactions were getting timed out.
He explained that Solana’s memory pool had a bug whereby automation bots could propose as many transactions as they wanted and a block producer had to check them all before making a block. The current upgrade allows block producers to limit the number of transactions proposed by a bot, thereby reducing the number of transactions that need to be verified.
Solana processes an average of 2,700 transactions per second and can theoretically process over 710,000 tps without any scaling solutions.
Another Solana outage?
The current upgrade comes just two weeks after the Solana network suffered a 7-hour outage due to an NFT minting bot, Candy Machine.
Developers explained that millions of transactions per second overloaded the platform and caused network validators to run out of memory and crash. Validators had to initiate a cluster restart to ensure all the nodes came back online.
Instead of a major update, the Solana network issues continue to be a growing pain. Twitter user Evan Van Ness revealed that the Solana network was down for 8 hours again yesterday as several transactions failed to push through. However, no official announcement was made by Solana at press time.
At press time, Solana traded at $51.59, down by 6% in the past 24 hours after Bitcoin’s price slipped towards $39K.