Solana Outlines Improvements to Prevent Further Outages
After a thorough investigation, Solana Foundation has finally released a report that reveals the root cause of the Mainnet Beta Outage that occurred on February 25, 2023. According to the report, congestion within the primary block-propagation protocol “Turbine” was the main reason behind long block finalization times and other technical problems. The report further reveals that several services running block-forwarding software transmitted data larger than a normal block, which caused the re-broadcasting of the large block to the Solana network to fail deduplication logic. This ultimately led to abnormal network traffic that saturated Turbine’s capacity, forcing most of the block data to be transmitted through the extremely slow backup block repair protocol. However, the core engineers have determined that the issue is caused by a failure in the deduplication logic in the shard forwarding service. To address this issue and prevent further outages, Solana Foundation has introduced several improvements to the Solana network.
How the Solana Outage Started
The slowdown on the Solana network began after a malfunctioning validator broadcast an abnormally large block during its leader slot. The block’s large size was due to padding out proof of history with virtual tick, which typically happens when a validator skips consensus due to misconfiguration, software bug, or hardware fault. Initially, validators considered issues with the upgrade to v1.14.16 as the reason behind the outage and restarted the chain with the previous upgrade. However, investigations revealed a change to Turbine in v1.14.16, which increased the maximum allowed number of recovery shreds in a block.
Improvements to the Solana Network
To prevent similar outages from happening again, Solana Foundation has made several improvements to the Solana network. First, core engineers have enhanced the deduplication logic with deduplication filter to prevent loops in the Turbine tree, increased deduplication filter capacity, and introduced a new deduplication filter to efficiently prevent duplicates. Secondly, engineers plan to improve the resiliency and compatibility of the design by working with shred-forwarding service providers. Solana Labs validator client patch is applied to restrict larger blocks. Lastly, all UDP-based networking protocols in the validator software will be replaced with QUIC. Implementing QUIC in Turbine will allow the protocol to guarantee that shreds ingested by a node in Turbine followed the protocol defined path, thus enforcing topology constraints within Turbine itself. These improvements will ensure that Solana network remains efficient, stable, and reliable.
Will SOL Price Rally?
The recent improvements to the Solana network are expected to have a positive impact on the SOL price. Investors and traders are likely to be impressed with Solana Foundation’s commitment to addressing the root cause of the outage and preventing further outages. This will boost their confidence in the Solana network, which could lead to increased demand for SOL tokens and a rise in the price of SOL. In conclusion, Solana Foundation’s improvements to the Solana network are a positive development for the platform and the SOL token. The increased efficiency, stability, and reliability of the network will attract more investors and traders to the Solana ecosystem, which could lead to a rally in SOL price in the coming months.
