Solana congestion issue caused by ‘too much demand’ – devs working on fix without ‘sleeping much’
Solana Labs head of communication Austin Federa said developers from across the ecosystem are involved in concerted efforts to improve the platform’s networking stack and resolve the issues that have caused a large number of transactions to fail on the network over the past few days.
Anza, Firedancer, Jito, and other core contributors are focusing on resolving the issue that has sparked significant discussion within the tech community. Developers are looking to deploy a fix on April 15.
Root cause
According to Federa, the root of the congestion lies in the network’s infrastructure. Specifically, the implementation of the QUIC protocol is not robust enough to handle the increased traffic.
Solana previously faced scalability challenges in early 2022, leading to a series of enhancements. However, the network did not anticipate the rapid increase in demand that recently transformed its capacity from “adequate but needing improvement” to “inadequate.”
Some describe the situation as a “failure of success,” highlighting the unexpected rate of growth and the planning challenges it presents.
The introduction of Firedancer, Solana’s first independent validator client implementation, marks a key upgrade. This development involves a near-complete rewrite of the networking stack.
Federa stressed the importance of balancing the introduction of new features with the necessity of maintaining and improving the network’s core functionality.
Solutions
In addressing potential solutions, Federa stated that the team is working to increase transaction per second (TPS) rates and, if necessary, to raise fees as a last resort to deter spam. The preferred approach is to develop methods to filter out spam without relying on fee adjustments.
The community’s reaction to the congestion has been mixed. While some users express concern over the network’s performance, others view the high traffic volume as a sign of Solana’s popularity.
The congestion issues have caused Solana to fall out of the top 3 cryptos by market cap as its price slid to a low of $162 from a local high of $210 over the past few days.
