Solana developers rally to combat network congestion

Recently, the Solana network experienced congestion issues, which resulted in noticeable delays in transaction processing and the loss of a large number of transactions.

Users of the popular Phantom wallet app on Solana and other apps were notified of data transfer issues and were told to expect a longer waiting period for transactions to complete.

The main cause of network congestion is the influx of spam transactions when bots try to prioritize their actions over the actions of regular users. This situation is exacerbated by the sharp increase in the number of transactions associated with newly issued memecoins, which has created excessive demand for the network's blockchain space and made it difficult for many users to access it.

In the first quarter of 2024, the Solana blockchain experienced a significant surge in memecoin activity, with the number of new tokens entering Solana DEXs reaching a record level during this time period.

This increase in activity is largely attributed to the popularity of the meme coin, thus demonstrating the growing interest in Solana among new and retail users, who are primarily attracted by the affordable transaction fees on the network.

However, it is worth noting that the increase in the number of spam transactions has become a weak point for the network.

Matt Sorg, technical and product leader at the Solana Foundation, drew comparisons between Solana's architectural features and the Internet's infrastructure.

In Solana, individual validators process transactions without using a memory pool, similar to how IP endpoints and servers operate on the Internet.

Sorg explained that the network sends transactions directly to leading blocks, bypassing any staging model or memory pool where transactions are waiting to be added to the network.

He suggested that excessive load from spam transactions could cause the system to crash, which could result in the loss of many transactions.

“There is a problem with this issue on Solana, leaving the user with no efficient way to include transactions in blocks.

The current systems of fees and transactions based on quantity are not working,” Sorg wrote in his note.

Strategies for overcoming overload

In response to these difficulties, the Solana development team is trying to find effective solutions, and according to company co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, they are already working on fixes for the software, but this will take some time.

“The Solana network is once again being tested during a huge influx of traffic.

The bug fixes will be implemented over the next week and the situation will begin to improve,” said Austin Federa, head of strategy for the Solana fund.

The current situation may spread to the network infrastructure, thereby preventing users from interacting with the blockchain.

To that end, Anza, the developer of one of Solana's Agave validator clients, will be introducing fixes that address specific issues with the QUIC implementation. These updates are expected to improve client performance, especially in high-volume query environments.

Another important step is the planned release of update 1.18 in April, which will introduce improvements that will make transaction scheduling more deterministic to streamline processing and reduce bottlenecks.

There is also the issue of introducing payment priority. Numerous applications running on Solana do not yet apply priority fees, which results in transactions being either delayed or not processed. Integrating dynamic priority fees into dApps will help solve user experience problems, Solana Labs said in a March blog post.