Solana proposes network upgrade changes following recent outage

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

The Solana network suffered a major outage on February 25th, with nearly 20 hours of downtime. It was the first outage of the year. However, 2022 saw him suffer 11 major outages and his three smaller outages, cementing a reputation for unreliable networks.

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

Until the 1.14 release, core engineers were working to fix real-world issues that were impacting the speed and usability of the network. These issues included invalid gas metering, lack of transaction flow control, , lack of a fee market, spiral RAM, storage and restart overhead.

However, the rollout of the 1.14 update caused significant network degradation. The cause is unknown at this time. Investigations to determine the root cause are still ongoing.

Solana focuses on network stability

Addressing this issue focuses on improving the software release process for updates. This includes using external developers and auditors to look 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. We are also looking into simpler and more efficient network restart procedures.

Nodes should optimistically detect the latest confirmed slots automatically and share missing ledgers with each other.

According to Yakovenko, over the past 12 months, Solana has already worked to improve network stability through various initiatives, including building a second validator client, better tools, and network communication protocols. upgrade to ‘QUIC’, improvements to the RPC infrastructure, and more.