Solana records 1 outage in first half of 2023, 100% uptime in Q2

July 21, 2023 Coin Telegraph

The Solana network is seeing steady improvements in performance and reliability as outages become more infrequent.

Layer-1 blockchain network Solana has shown an improvement in reliability and uptime so far this year only having one outage in 2023, according to a report from the Solana Foundation.

On July 20, the Solana Foundation released its latest performance report stating it has improved the network through the first half of 2023, as measured by uptime and the ratio of non-voting-to-voting transactions.

In previous years, Solana has been plagued with reliability and uptime issues which its co-founder, Anatoly Yakovenko, has previously called a “curse” but said the network’s low-cost transactions were the cause of the outages.

The latest report noted Solana has experienced 100% uptime since Feb. 25, marking a whole quarter without an outage. The single February outage saw the network knocked offline for almost 19 hours.

*Solana achieved a 100% uptime in Q2, 2023. Source: Solana*

The report added there have been improvements in the ratio of voting to non-voting transactions. Voting transactions occur when a validator votes to confirm one or more proposed blocks of information and non-voting transactions are triggered by user behavior on the blockchain.

“Over time, we would expect to see the ratio of voting to non-voting transactions go down because the overall percentage of voting transactions should drop as the network gets more efficient.”

Blocktimes, which measure how quickly new blocks are added to the chain, have also become more consistent aside from the spike during the outage.

1/ The Solana Foundation has released the most recent @Solana Network Performance report.

The Solana network’s performance has improved through H1 2023, as measured by uptime, the ratio of non-voting-to-voting transactions, & more.

Read the full report: https://t.co/naOftyknLA pic.twitter.com/yI9Q8swWdT
— Solana Foundation (@SolanaFndn) July 20, 2023

Transactions per second (TPS) are also used to measure the network’s performance and throughput. Solana’s maximum daily TPS has been climbing since January with significant increases that correlate with new network upgrades, it noted. Dune Analytics reports the current figure on the network at 3,777 transactions per second.

The Artemis dashboard reports a daily transaction count of 19.2 million for Solana which has been the leader for this metric until it was recently usurped by the Sui Network due to the popularity of a Web3 game.

The price of the blockchain's native token, Solana (SOL),was down 4.5% on the day — around $25.50 at the time of writing, according to Cointelegraph data.

The token has been performing well over the past month with gains of 50% but remains down 90% from its November 2021 all-time high of $260.

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Solana’s co-founder addresses the blockchain’s reliability at Breakpoint

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Anatoly Yakovenko

In 2022, the blockchain suffered from ten partial or full outages along with slow block times. Solana’s co-founder said it’s “not the experience that we want to deliver.”

Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko says the past year has been mired by the network’s reliability issues and outages, but recent updates will help the blockchain resolve its reliability issues.

During the Breakpoint 2022 annual conference in Lisbon, Portugal on Nov. 5, Yakovenko discussed the past and future of the blockchain, noting the network has faced difficulties over the past year:

“We've had a lot of challenges over the last year, I would say this whole last year has been all about reliability.”

Solana has suffered ten partial or full outages, according to its own status reporting, the most notable of which occurred between Jan. 6-12, 2022, with the network plagued with issues causing partial outages and degraded performance for between 8 and 18 hours. The most recent was what it called a “major outage,” lasting nearly six and a half hours on Oct. 1.

Between late May and early June, Solana suffered from a clock drift, where the blockchain’s time was different from real-world time due to longer than average slot times (also referred to as block times), the time interval during which a validator can send a block to Solana.

Typically, Solana’s ideal slot time is 400 milliseconds, but Yakovenko said that “things got really really bad in June, block times went up to over a second, which is really slow for Solana,” adding in some cases “confirmation times so we're taking 15 to 20 seconds:”

“That’s not the experience that we want to deliver and that’s a pretty bad Web2 experience when you’re competing with Google with Facebook with all these other applications.”

Yakovenko said after a recent update and the validator count doubling in the past year puts Solana on the path to resolving the network performance issues and added:

“[We’re] in a constant fight between performance, security, throughput, and decentralization, all of these problems [...] whenever you improve one you may actually hurt some of the other ones but I think we've done an amazing job in solving a bunch of those.”

“Obviously we still have challenges with outages and bugs,” he said, but its August partnership with Web3 development firm Jump Crypto to build Solana’s scaling solution called Firedancer — dubbed the long-term fix to the network outage problem — could hold the key.

“Having a second implementation and a second client built by a different team with a fully separate code base, the probability of the same kind of bug existing in both is virtually zero.”

Outages