Recently, the Solana network has been suffering from congestion issues, which have resulted in noticeable delays in transaction processing and many transactions being dropped.
Users of the popular Phantom Wallet app from Solana and other apps have warned users of congestion and advised to expect longer wait times for transactions to be completed.
Congestion affecting the network is primarily caused by an influx of spam transactions, with bots attempting to prioritize their own activity over that of regular users. This problem is further exacerbated by the rapid increase in transactions involving newly launched memecoins, placing enormous demand on the network’s block space and hindering access for many users.
In the first quarter of 2024, the Solana blockchain saw a significant increase in memecoin activity, and the number of new tokens appearing on the Solana DEX reached an all-time high during this period.
This increase in activity around meme coins highlights the growing interest in Solana among new and retail users attracted by the network’s low transaction fees. However, the influx of spam transactions emerged as a bottleneck in the network.
Matt Sorg, Technology and Product Leader at Solana Foundation, said: drew Comparison of Solana’s architecture and Internet infrastructure. In a Solana setup, individual validators process transactions without using a mempool, similar to how IP endpoints and servers operate on the Internet.
Sorg explained that the network delivers transactions directly to the block leader, bypassing the staging model or mempool where transactions can wait before being added to the chain. He suggested that an overload of spam transactions could overwhelm the system, potentially leading to many transactions being halted.
“This process at Solana is problematic, leaving users with no reliable way to include transactions in blocks. We haven’t arrived at a system for fee- and equity-weighted trading.” Sorg wrote In the X post.
Congestion relief strategy
In response to these challenges, the Solana development team is devising effective solutions, and software patches are already in the works, but will take some time. According to Co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.
“The Solana network does it again. It is battle tested with huge influx of traffic. Bug fixes will be rolling out next week and things will start to improve,” says Austin Federa, Head of Strategy at Solana Foundation. famous.
Current congestion may extend to the network infrastructure, impacting users’ ability to interact with the blockchain. Regarding this, Anza, Agave validator client developer at Solana, said: will introduce This fix addresses a specific issue with the QUIC implementation. These updates are expected to improve client performance, especially in high-request scenarios.
Another important development is the planned release of update 1.18, targeted for April. This update introduces enhancements that make transaction scheduling more deterministic, with the goal of streamlining processing and reducing bottlenecks.
Then there is the matter of implementing priority fees. Many applications running on Solana do not currently utilize priority fees, resulting in transactions being delayed or not processed. According to a March blog post from Solana Labs, integrating dynamic priority fees into dApps will help address user experience issues.
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