Solana developers rally to combat network congestion

The Solana network’s transaction speed is limited right now because too many unnecessary transactions are taking place. The Solana developers are trying to remove this bottleneck through software upgrades and improvements.

In the last month, the Solana network has been struggling with slowdowns, which have led to transactions taking ages and many of them not getting processed.

The Phantom wallet app, among other Solana-based applications, has already notified its users about the congestion problem, and they should keep that in mind when processing transactions that might take longer to complete.

The network works poorly because spam transactions come first, where bots try to jump ahead of normal users. Now, things have gone out of hand as cryptocurrencies based on jokes have gone viral. This has overloaded the network. Consequently, it has become difficult for users to promote their transactions successfully.

Through early 2024, the Solana blockchain witnessed a considerable jump in activities concerning memecoin cryptocurrencies. Similarly, the generation of new tokens on Solana’s decentralized exchanges set the record for the peak when they were all created at this time.

The burst of action around the joke tokens helps underpin growing interest in the network from new and fun users, mainly attracted by the low transaction costs. However, excessive spam transactions are now the major problem for the network in achieving efficiency.

Solana developers are coming up with solutions and making ongoing upgrades to the software to solve the congestion problem. Still, it will take some time to complete, according to co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko. As shown by Austin Federa, a strategy lead at Solana Foundation, the network is indeed facing a sudden increase in traffic, and the bugs will be fixed in the next week, which will partially reduce the congestion.

Furthermore, the congestion could impact the network’s underlying infrastructure as it will change how users interact with the blockchain. Regarding this, Anza, who works at Solana’s Agave validator client, is scheduled to release a revised version of the code to resolve the bugs in the QUIC implementation. The main aim of these upgrades is to increase the system performance and, particularly, the throughput under very heavy loads.

Moreover, the second version of the update, to be released in April, will be dedicated to the process of transaction booking. This update aims to reduce the network’s complexity and improve the speed of processing protrusion, thus making it more effective.

Furthermore, priority fees have been implemented, which is another significant development. It is not uncommon to observe that many applications on Solana do not implement the priority fee, which can cause the transactions to be delayed or not processed at all. To ensure a better user experience, the dynamic priority fees proposed by Solana Labs will be used by decentralized applications (dApps) in their services, as mentioned in a post published in the March blog.

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