Solana Network aims to become robust, developers share 3 key mitigation steps

On Saturday, the Solana network experienced its seventh failure, resulting in a delay of more than seven hours. The development team at Solana Labs has issued an outage report, as well as three critical mitigating steps for improving network stability.

Due to NFT minting bots, the network downtime on Solana was caused by a huge increase in the number of transactions. Candy Machine, a popular program used by Solana NFT projects to initiate collections, was used by the bots.

On April 30th, Solana's Mainnet Beta cluster suffered a 7 hour outage caused by stalled consensus. Below is an investigation into the cause of the outage, and the steps core developers are taking to increase network resiliency and stability. https://t.co/pfkMTEwPda

— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) May 3, 2022

Individual nodes were overflowing with 100 Gbps data when the transaction volume hit six million per second. As a result, validators ran out of data memory, resulting in a breakdown in consensus.

Solana Network aims to become resilient to such concerns

Three important mitigating procedures are being implemented to make the Solana network more immune to such congestion concerns, according to the official report. 

• The first important step is to switch from the present user datagram protocol (UDP) to the Google-developed fast UDP internet connection protocol (QUIC). QUIC provides fast asynchronous communication similar to UDP but with sessions and flow control similar to TCP.
• The incorporation of stake-weighted transaction processing, rather than the present first-come-first-served model, is the second critical stage. Stake-weighted transaction processing combined with QUIC, according to the developers, would be more resilient.
• The third mitigation step is to implement “fee-based execution priority,” in which customers might pay an additional price in addition to the standard fee. For the v1.11 release, the fee prioritization has been set.

Apart from the Solana network failure, the beta cluster restart instructions, allegedly provided by validator operators, sparked even more debate. Validators were instructed to manually prevent NFT minting bots at the layer-1 layer, according to the instructions.

However, Solana’s head of communication, Austin Federa, noted that the majority of validators stayed away from censorship and that the Candy Machine is getting a new update with more anti-bot features.

This is not the first time when the the leading crypto network has been found in such a situation. Before this, as TheCoinRise reported in September, Solana Blockchain experienced an outage. In January this year, the network was again found crashing several times.