Solana’s Mainnet Beta Update v1.17.31: Resolving Congestion Issues

Solana developers have recently released a mainnet beta update, v1.17.31, in response to the persistent network congestion on the Solana blockchain. After three days of testing, this update is now recommended for general use by mainnet beta validators. This patch includes several improvements that aim to address the network congestion and will be followed by further enhancements in the upcoming v1.18 release. The current version of the update is expected to alleviate the network congestion and resolve issues with the open interest jump.

Some of the key upgrades included in this patch are as follows:

1. Show staked vs non-staked packets sent down/throttled quic: By using smallvec to aggregate chunks, this enhancement helps conserve resources by saving one allocation per packet.

2. BankingStage Forwarding Filter: This improvement tightens the minimal streams per 100 milliseconds for staked nodes.

3. Treat super low staked as unstaked in streamer QOS: This adjustment categorizes nodes with extremely low stake as unstaked in the streamer quality of service.

4. Set the default staked client in LocalCluster: This modification designates the default staked client in the LocalCluster.

The Solana developer community has urged validators to upgrade to the latest patch only if the delinquent stake is less than 5%. Delinquency in Solana refers to inactive validators, and the percentage indicates the total stake held by offline validators. Therefore, validators are advised to install the updates only when the percentage of inactive stakes on the network is below 5%.

During a period of increased network activity and a frenzy around memecoins, the Solana network experienced congestion issues for nearly a week, resulting in a transaction failure rate as high as 75%. While developers were diligently working on a fix, the co-founder of Solana emphasized that the ongoing congestion issues were a bug rather than a fundamental network problem. The Solana Foundation identified multiple factors contributing to the current network congestion, including high demand for Solana block space and delays in implementing patches to address network-related issues.

Austin Federa, the strategy lead at Solana Foundation, acknowledged that developers have been tirelessly working to resolve the problem; The network demand has outpaced the timely intervention by developers. In response to this challenge, Solana developers have developed a series of patches to tackle the ongoing network congestion issue. The first patch was released earlier today specifically for developers to implement.