Solana developers recently rolled out the mainnet beta update v1.17.31 as a response to the ongoing network congestion plaguing the Solana blockchain. Released on April 12, the update has undergone three days of testing and is now recommended for general use by mainnet beta validators. This patch is aimed at tackling network congestion issues and lays the groundwork for further improvements in the upcoming v1.18 release.
Key enhancements included in this update are targeted at addressing network congestion and issues related to open interest jumping. Among these upgrades are improvements such as the display of pledged and non-pledged packets, optimization of packet allocation using smallvec aggregation blocks, and the implementation of a BankingStage forwarding filter. Additionally, adjustments have been made to the staking node flow, treating ultra-low stakes as unstaking in streaming QOS, and setting the default staking client in LocalCluster.
Solana developer Anza has specified that validators should only upgrade to the latest patch if the delinquent stake falls below 5%. Delinquency, in Solana's context, refers to inactive validators, and the percentage refers to the total stake of offline validators. Therefore, validators are advised to install updates only when the inactive validator stake on the network is less than 5%.
Despite efforts to mitigate the congestion, Solana faced significant network issues for nearly a week, with transaction failure rates soaring to as high as 75%. Solana's co-founder clarified that the ongoing congestion is attributed to a bug rather than a fundamental network issue. The Solana Foundation attributed the congestion to several factors, including high demand for Solana block space and delays in implementing patches to address network-related issues.
Austin Federa, head of strategy at the Solana Foundation, highlighted the relentless efforts of developers to resolve the issue. He mentioned that engineers worked tirelessly, sacrificing sleep to prepare and test patches before deploying them to the mainnet. In response to the current challenges, Solana developers have developed a series of patches, with the first one being released to developers on April 15.
