Solana's Growth Pains

The Solana network is facing a congestion issues, leading to noticeable delays in transaction processing and a large number of transactions being dropped, Phantom wallet users and other apps have notified users of congestion, advising them to expect longer wait times for their transactions to complete. The congestion is mainly due to the influx of spam transactions, with bots attempting to prioritize their activities over those of regular users. This is exacerbated by a dramatic increase in transactions associated with newly released memecoins, that is attracting a lot of attention from buyers and investors, creating an extraordinary demand for the network’s block space and resulting in impeded access for many users.
In the first quarter of 2024, memecoin activity in the Solana blockchain experienced a significant uptick, and the number of new tokens appearing on Solana DEXs reached a record high during this period. The memecoin driven increase in activity underscores the rising interest in Solana among new and retail users, attracted by the network’s affordable transaction fees. However, the influx of spam transactions has emerged as a bottleneck for the network.
According to Solana Foundation's Matt Sorg tech and product leader, Solana’s individual validators set-up process transactions without the use of a mempool, similar to how IP endpoints and servers operate on the internet. The network dispatches transactions directly to block leaders, bypassing any staging model or mempool where transactions might wait before being added to the chain. 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,” Sorg wrote in an X post.
Solana Step-in to Combat Congestion
According to Solana's co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, developers are devising effective solutions, and software patches are already being worked on but don't expect it to be finished overnight. " Bug fixes are rolling out over the next week, and things will start to improve,” Austin Federa, strategy lead at Solana Foundation added. Anza, the developer of one of Solana’s Agave validator client stated "the team will be testing a patch to address current network congestion. If successful, this patch will be readied for wider rollout." The core issue relates to a QUIC implementation, and the behavior of the Agave validator client on Solana Network when asked to process a large number of requests. QUIC updates are expected to enhance the client’s performance, particularly in scenarios involving high request volumes.
The planned release of the 1.18 update targeted for April will introduce enhancements to make transaction scheduling more deterministic, aiming to streamline the processing and reduce bottlenecks. Implementing and integrating dynamic priority fees will help address user experience issues.
Conclusion
The growth of Solana as a blockchain as can be seen by the number of dApps (481 latest count) and Tokens (92 latest count) developed under the network, brings along with it problems that cannot be foreseen even in a high tech world. Buyers and investors will flock to were they can profit, dApps and crypto developers will flock to were the fees are low to maximize their profit. All of this factors met at the blockchain that can offer them both resulting in bottleneck and failed transactions. So while we wait for the needed update on the network, Solana is still processing transaction albeit in a much slower pace. So while this is still going on i'm not touching my Phantom wallet until the update is done. :)




Source and for all updates regarding Solana Network:
https://www.theblock.co/post/286868/solana-network-congestion
https://solana.com/news/block-optimization-on-the-solana-network
https://www.alchemy.com/ecosystem/solana
https://cryptoslate.com/blockchain/solana/
Matt Sorg X account
https://x.com/tamgros/status/1776396573393527253
Anza X account
https://x.com/anza_xyz/status/1776347491195388156