Solana developers rally to combat network congestion

In recent weeks, the Solana network has been grappling with congestion issues, leading to noticeable delays in transaction processing and a large number of transactions being dropped.

Users of the popular Phantom wallet app on Solana and other apps have notified users of congestion, advising them to expect longer wait times for their transactions to complete.

The congestion affecting the network is largely due to an influx of spam transactions, with bots trying to prioritize their activities over those of regular users. This issue is exacerbated by a dramatic increase in transactions associated with newly released memecoins, creating an extraordinary demand for the network’s block space and resulting in impeded access for many users.

In the first quarter of 2024, the Solana blockchain experienced a large uptick in memecoin activity, and the number of new tokens appearing on Solana DEXs reached a record high during the time period.

While this surge, primarily fueled by a frenzy surrounding meme coins, highlights a growing preference for Solana among new and retail users who may find the network’s transaction costs not prohibitive. At the same time, spam transactions from bots have proven to be a bottleneck for the network.

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

Sorg explained that the network dispatches transactions directly to block leaders, bypassing any staging model or mempool where transactions might wait before being added to the chain. He suggested that an overload of spam transactions could overwhelm this system, potentially resulting in many transactions being dropped.

“There’s an issue with this process on Solana, resulting in a user not having a reliable way to get transactions included into blocks. The systems in place for fees and stake-weighted transactions aren’t being reached,” Matt Sorg, Product and Tech Leadership at the Solana Foundation, wrote in an X post.

Strategies to combat congestion

In response to these challenges, the Solana development team is devising effective solutions, and software patches are already being worked on but will take some time, according to co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

An important step forward is the planned release of the 1.18 update targeted for April. This update will introduce enhancements to make transaction scheduling more deterministic, aiming to streamline the processing and reduce bottlenecks.

This current congestion may extend into the network’s infrastructure, thereby impacting users’ ability to interact with the blockchain. In this regard, Anza, the developer of one of Solana’s Agave validator clients, will introduce fixes addressing specific issues related to its QUIC implementation. These updates are expected to enhance the client’s performance, particularly in scenarios involving high request volumes.

Then there’s the matter of implementing priority fees. Numerous applications operating on Solana currently do not utilize priority fees, leading to transactions that are either delayed or not processed. Integrating dynamic priority fees into dApps will help address user experience issues, a March blog post from Solana Labs stated.