Solana proposes network upgrade changes following recent outage

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko said plans are in place to improve network reliability.

The Solana network suffered a significant outage on Feb. 25, leading to downtime that lasted close to 20 hours. It was the first interruption of service to occur this year. However, 2022 saw 11 major outages and 3 minor ones – cementing a reputation for poor network reliability.

Yakovenko said last week’s outage was related to the 1.14 network update, which was intended to bring speed and scale improvements.

“Up to the 1.14 release, core engineers were working to fix live problems that were impacting the network’s speed and usability. These issues included invalid gas metering, lack of flow control for transactions, lack of fee markets, spiraling ram, storage and restart overhead.”

However, the rollout of the 1.14 update triggered significant network degradation, the cause of which is unknown at this time. An investigation to determine the root cause is still ongoing.

Solana focused on network stability

Addressing the issue will focus on improving the software release process for updates. This will involve using external developers and auditors to hunt for bugs and exploits.

Other changes include forming an adversarial team to “build additional hooks and instrumentation into the validator code” for more thorough testing. Also, looking into simpler, more efficient network restart procedures.

“Nodes should be automatically discovering the latest optimistically confirmed slot and sharing the ledger with each other if it is missing.”

Yakovenko said over the past 12 months, Solana was already working on improving network stability through various initiatives, including building a second validator client, better tooling, upgrading the network communication protocol to “QUIC,” and improvements to the RPC infrastructure.

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