(Commonwealth Union)_ According to Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, the previous year has been plagued by network stability concerns and outages, but new modifications will assist the blockchain in resolving these issues.
On November 5, at the Breakpoint 2022 annual conference in Lisbon, Portugal, Yakovenko described the blockchain’s past and future, saying that the network had endured obstacles in the past year. “We’ve had a lot of challenges in the prior year, and I’d say the last year has been all about consistency,” he said.
According to its own status reporting, Solana has experienced 10 partial or full outages, the most prominent of which occurred between Jan. 6-12, 2022, with the network afflicted by difficulties causing partial outages and poor performance for between 8 and 18 hours. The most recent “major outage” occurred on October 1 and lasted over six and a half hours.
Solana had clock drift between late May and early June, when the blockchain’s time diverged from real-world time due to slot lengths (also known as block timings), the time interval during which a validator can send a block to Solana.
Solana’s optimal slot time is 400 milliseconds, but “things were really very terrible in June, block times went up to over a second, which is really sluggish for Solana,” according to Yakovenko, who adds that “confirmation times are such we’re taking 15 to 20 seconds”. “That’s not the experience we want to provide, and it’s a pretty bad Web2 experience when you’re up against Google, Facebook, and all these other apps,” he noted.
Yakovenko stated that a recent update, as well as the validator count increasing in the last year, had put Solana on track to resolving network speed difficulties. “[We’re] in a constant war between performance, security, throughput, and decentralisation, all of these difficulties […] whenever you improve one, you may really harm some of the others, but I think we’ve done a great job in overcoming a lot of things,” he added.
“Obviously, we still have difficulties with outages and bugs,” he said, but the company’s August collaboration with Web3 development firm Jump Crypto to build Solana’s scaling solution called Firedancer — branded the long-term solution to the network outage problem — could hold the key. “The likelihood of the same type of bug occurring in both is almost nil with a second implementation and a second client created by a different team with a completely independent code base.”
