Solana developers rally to combat network congestion

In recent days, the Solana network has suffered from congestion issues, leading to noticeable delays in transaction processing and the cancellation of a large number of transactions.

Users of the popular Phantom wallet app on Solana and other apps have been alerting users to traffic congestion and advising them to expect longer wait times before their transactions are completed.

The network congestion is largely due to an influx of spam transactions, with bots trying to prioritize their activities over those of regular users. This problem is exacerbated by a dramatic increase in transactions associated with newly released memecoins, creating extraordinary demand for 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 Solana DEXs reached an all-time high during this period.

This increase in activity, largely driven by meme coins, underlines the increasing interest in Solana among new and retail users, attracted by the network’s affordable transaction fees. However, the influx of spam transactions has proven to be a bottleneck for the network.

Matt Sorg, technology and product leader at the Solana Foundation, pulled a comparison between Solana’s architecture and the infrastructure of the Internet. In Solana’s setup, individual validators process transactions without the use of a mempool, similar to how IP endpoints and servers work on the Internet.

Sorg explained that the network sends transactions directly to block leaders, bypassing any staging model or mempool that allows transactions to wait before being added to the chain. He suggested that an overload of spam transactions could overwhelm this system, leading to many transactions being halted.

“There is an issue with this process on Solana that leaves a user without a reliable way to have transactions included in blocks. Existing systems for fees and stake-weighted trades are not being achieved,” Sorg said wrote in an X message.

Strategies to combat congestion

In response to these challenges, Solana’s development team is creating effective solutions, and software patches are already underway, but this will take some time. according to co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

“The Solana network is once again being put to the test with a huge influx of traffic. Bug fixes will be rolled out over the next week and things will improve,” continued Austin Federa, strategy lead at the Solana Foundation. noted.

This current congestion may extend into the network’s infrastructure, affecting users’ ability to interact with the blockchain. In this regard, Anza, the developer of one of Solana’s Agave validator clients, Will introduce solutions to specific problems related to QUIC implementation. These updates are expected to improve client performance, especially in high request volume scenarios.

Another important step forward is the planned release of update 1.18, scheduled for April. This update introduces improvements to make transaction scheduling more deterministic, with the aim of streamlining processing and reducing bottlenecks.

Then there is the matter of introducing priority fees. Numerous applications running on Solana currently do not use priority fees, leading to transactions being delayed or not processed. Integrating dynamic priority compensation into dApps will help address user experience issues, a March blog post from Solana Labs mentioned.