Why is Solana Experiencing Network Congestion Issues?

The Solana network, commonly termed the “Ethereum killer” network, has suffered several outages in the recent months. In the early morning hours of Thursday last week, the Solana blockchain network suffered another outage and shut down for hours. According to an announcement by Coinbase-on-Coinbase status, the network mainnet suffered an outage.

This recent outage adds to the already numerous outages the Solana network has faced this year. In January, Solana recorded its worst-ever number of outages-six. The platform has suffered 11 outages of partial and severe degrees in the past four months.

The previous outage occurred on May 1st. The partial outage triggered a botting activity on an NFT marketplace built around the platform’s blockchain. The vast numbers of transactions generated by the bots minting NFT flooded the platform’s network, making it crash. During this outage, the Solana network shut down for approximately seven hours. The outage is said to have been allegedly caused by an urgency in the number of transactions.

The latest outage saw a tweet from Solana status, briefly describing what transpired during the disruption. According to Solana status, a bug inside the durable nonce transactions feature caused nondeterminism when nodes created different outcomes for the identical block. As a result, the network was hindered from carrying on.

In addition, one of the developers of the Solana Blockchain wrote a tweet addressing the outage, saying that chain splits are caused when two sections of the network process a different state when provided with similar transactions for any cause. The developer added that a particular class of bugs existed that are extremely difficult to prevent even where a large-scale test is involved. And that this class of bugs affects any chain.

The developer also said several node enactments are an excellent strategy to evade chain-split problems. He mentioned that the restart was merely a short-term strategy and that the issue required a long-term resolution.

The Solana network was finally restored after four long hours. Solana’s official Twitter account reported the news about the blockchain’s network outage. All transactions were suspended during this time, and everyday functionality only resumed after the network had been fully restored.

Last month’s disruption caused by the May 1st outage saw Solana implement plans to improve the network’s stability. These improvements were supposed to fix the overcrowding problems faced by the network. However, a section of Twitter users has raised concerns about the said update. These users have highlighted that Solana’s network problems have worsened daily since the update.

Several netizens think the Solana blockchain team should dig deeper to identify a permanent solution that will get rid of the outages for good instead of depending on short-term solutions.

The data obtained by CoinMarketCap, the SOL token native to the network of the Solana blockchain, has dropped by around 12.52% and is currently trading at approximately $30 (£25) from 8.00. a.m. 14.06.2022

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