Solana developers have released a mainnet beta update named v1.17.31 to address ongoing network congestion. The update was released on April 12 and, after three days of testing, is now recommended for general use by mainnet beta validators. This update includes enhancements that will help alleviate some of the ongoing network congestion, with further improvements to follow in v1.18.
Update Released for Solana
The current version will help improve issues related to network congestion and rising open interest. The highlights of this update include:
- Display of staked and unstaked packets.
- BankingStage Routing Filter.
- Tightening the minimum flow rate per 100 ms for supported nodes.
- Opportunity to treat super low stake in Publisher QOS as unstaked.
- Default staked client solution in LocalCluster.
Solana developer Anza has asked validators to upgrade to the latest update only when there are less than 5% inactive validators on the network. This process in Solana refers to inactive validators, and the total number of validators offline. Therefore, validators are requested to install updates only when there are less than 5% inactive validator validators on the network.
Solana Ecosystem and Network Congestion
Amid growing network activity and the memecoin frenzy, the Solana network faced congestion issues with up to a 75% transaction failure rate for nearly a week. While developers worked on a fix, Solana co-founder stated that the ongoing network congestion issues were merely a bug rather than a network problem.
The Solana Foundation attributed the current network congestion issues to high demand for the Solana ecosystem and various factors including delayed implementation of updates to overcome network-related problems.
Solana Foundation strategy leader Austin Federa said developers are working tirelessly to resolve the issue, but network demand has outpaced developers’ timely intervention. However, Solana developers have developed a series of patches to overcome the ongoing issue, and the first update was released early today for developers.