Solana Outage Prompts CEO To Outline Network Improvement Plan

Solana’s CEO Anatoly Yakovenko has announced plans to improve the network’s speed and scale while acknowledging the challenge of maintaining stability. Therefore, in a recent blog post, core engineers were working to resolve real-time issues affecting the network’s speed and usability.

2022 priorities were shipping new features and new tools. 2023 is stability. Tldr 1/3 of core eng is going to be focused on stability and adversarial testing. Here’s my thoughts. https://t.co/Z6pR9hhYbP

— toly 🇺🇸| bip-420 (@aeyakovenko) March 1, 2023

Issues such as invalid gas metering, lack of flow control for transactions, and spiraling storage and restart overhead were hindering the network’s performance. Solana Labs and third-party core engineering teams have been working over the last 12 months to improve the network’s stability, and they plan to continue doing so.

In addition, they will build an additional validator client to improve the network’s throughput, efficiency, and resiliency. Network communication will be transitioned to a more advanced networking protocol called QUIC. Improvements to RPC infrastructure will also reduce their load.

Solana Recent Network Outage & Future Enhancements

However, In the recent 1.14 network update, Solana’s network faced a slowdown in block production, causing massive disruptions to transactions. Additionally, the incident prompted validators to downgrade the software to restore network performance. The technical outage began at around 6:00 am UTC.

Despite the downgrade, normal operations remained suspended, and the network had to be restarted on version 1.13.6. It was still unclear what caused the 20-hour network outage.  But Yakovenko dismissed claims that the disruptions were brought on by a large number of validator messages and the on-chain voting system clogging its consensus layer.

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According to Brandon Tucker, an upgrade will enhance the SOL blockchain and ‘slash’ future network freezes. However, Solana’s numerous outages still stain the blockchain despite the upgrade.”

Solana, a famous blockchain network, has faced significant challenges in the past, including two incidents where the network went offline for 20 hours each. Despite these issues, the network has managed to revive itself twice successfully.

However, Solana’s founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, has recognized the need for improvement in order to ensure greater stability for the network moving forward. To that end, Yakovenko has put forth a plan to enhance the network’s speed and scale while maintaining its stability.

Moreover, the goal is to provide a better user experience and attract more users to the Solana ecosystem. With this plan in place, Solana aims to continue to be a leading player in the blockchain space.