Solana, a network designed for decentralized apps, suffered a major outage on Feb. 25, 2022, lasting almost 20 hours.
The incident brought Solana’s reputation for poor network reliability to the forefront. However, Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko has recently announced that plans are in place to improve network stability.
The 1.14 network update was intended to bring speed and scale improvements but instead triggered significant network degradation. An investigation to determine the root cause is ongoing. Yakovenko acknowledged that the issues with the Solana network have included invalid gas metering, lack of flow control for transactions, and a lack of fee markets.
To address the issue, Solana will improve its software release process for updates, using external developers and auditors to hunt for bugs and exploits. Other changes will include forming an adversarial team to build additional hooks and instrumentation into the validator code, making for more thorough testing. The team will also investigate simpler and more efficient network restart procedures.
Over the past 12 months, Solana has been working on improving network stability through various initiatives. This includes building a second validator client, better tooling, upgrading the network communication protocol to “QUIC,” and improvements to the RPC infrastructure.
