What’s Wrong with Solana Blockchain!? – Can Devs Do Something?

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The “downtime” issue that Solana has been having is now frequently condemned by the community. In addition to the more than 10 hours of downtime that occurred last week, Solana has had other instances of either network jamming or downtime in the past.

Solana outage on Oct 1, 2022

Last week, Solana outages are caused by an error in a validator configuration, which involves running repeated instances of the validator. This means that when it’s turn to produce a block, and each instance will be produce a block, for the other validators, some see is the instance of the block A, and some see is the instance of the block B. They were unable to determine which block was accurate, which led to the eventual shutdown of the network.

History of Solana Network Outages

Around the 4th of May, 2021, a decrease in the performance of the network led to a large number of transactions not successfully completing.

Around September 3, 2021, the network will go through a period of instability, during which its performance will suffer for around one hour.

Around September 14, 2021, there was a significant amount of IDO activity associated with the Grape Protocol on the Raydium platform. As a result of this activity, many users sent a significant number of transactions via machine scripts that they had created. This caused a problem known as “memory overflow,” which brought validator nodes to a halt and, ultimately, stopped the entire network from producing blocks. It was offline for a total of 17 hours.

Around January 21, 2022, as a result of the high volatility of the market, a large number of trades that were submitted by arbitrage bots rushed the network. This put the network under a great deal of pressure, which may have resulted in an outage that lasted for thirty hours. The Solana community then upgraded the main network to version 1.8.14 in an attempt to improve the network state, despite the fact that it was officially categorised as having Degraded Performance at the time.

After Solana network nodes failed to reach a consensus on May 1, 2022, which caused a significant increase in the number of bot transactions, block production was halted for approximately seven hours. This was due to the casting of a new NFT project, which was the cause of the increase in bot transactions.

The network was restarted around the 1st of June 2022, and the duration of the downtime, which was caused by a vulnerability in the transaction’s Durable Nonce function, was approximately 4.5 hours.

Around the third of August in 2022, a large number of tokens were taken from Solana wallets, and it was later determined that a vulnerability in the centralised Sentry server was to blame.

The Problem – “Solana Mechanism

The main cause of network disruptions in the past was the addition of a large number of transactions, which may be related to Solana’s mechanism.

Can Devs Do Something?

“In response to widespread spam transactions that were degrading network performance and even causing outages, the co-founder of Solana, Anatoly Yakovenko, acknowledged the problem and promised to implement “real flow management” in version 1.9 of the mainnet beta for Solana in order to resolve the issue.


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