Solana Releases Plans To Improve Network Upgrades For More Stability

Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko announced on Tuesday that his company will enhance its software upgrade process to ensure network dependability and uptime. He stated that delivering a fast, reliable, and scalable network to progress towards a better, decentralized web remains their top priority. 

Yakovenko explained that the challenges in maintaining stability during significant updates were highlighted by the problems encountered during the 1.14 network update, which aimed to improve speed and scalability.

The Solana network’s core engineers were working on fixing technical issues such as invalid gas metering, lack of flow control for transactions, and lack of fee markets that were impeding the network’s speed and usability prior to the 1.14 release. Improving user experience was their primary objective, and these issues were given priority.

You can find the official announcement here.

Following the latest release, the core engineers intend to bring in additional external developers and auditors to test and identify any vulnerabilities. Furthermore, they will create an adversarial team comprising almost a third of the Solana Labs core engineering team. The core engineers will continue to provide support to external core engineers, including Jump Crypto’s Firedancer team, which is constructing a second validator client.

Additionally, the core engineers will enhance the restart process by ensuring that nodes can automatically locate the most recent confirmed slot and share the ledger with each other if it is missing. Over the previous year, Solana Labs and third-party core engineering teams have been working towards enhancing network stability.

According to Yakovenko, the Firedancer team from Jump Crypto is working on constructing a second validator client to enhance the network’s throughput, efficiency, and resiliency. Meanwhile, Mango DAO developers are focusing on the necessary tooling required to build on Solana. These remarks were made in response to a prolonged weekend outage experienced by the Solana blockchain.

The sluggish transaction processing issues quickly escalated to a near-total cessation of activity on the network. On Monday, developers stated that the reason for the network-wide outage over the weekend remained uncertain, but investigations were continuing.

https://solana.com/news/02-25-23-solana-mainnet-beta-outage-report