Solana Formally Acknowledges Problems With 'High Compute' Transactions Clogging the Network

Solana, a top ten smart contracts-enabled cryptocurrency by market cap, has acknowledged it is facing a series of problems hindering the performance of its network. The official account of the status of the network, as well as the status page, reported this incident yesterday. This is the latest issue Solana is facing after experiencing several network disruptions during the past months.

Solana Facing Throughput Issues

Solana, a smart contracts-enabled cryptocurrency, has formally acknowledged its network is suffering performance issues affecting the throughput of the system and causing it to drop certain transactions. The report was issued by the Solana Status Twitter account of the project, which informed users of the situation yesterday.

The account explained:

[The network is experiencing] degraded performance due to an increase in high compute transactions, which is reducing network capacity to several thousand transactions per second. This is leading to increased loading and transaction processing times, and some failed transactions.

This report was posted on January 6, 16:11 UTC and at the time of writing, the issue has not yet been solved. It was also reported that the developers were working to address these issues and solve the problem.

Woes Aplenty

This is not the first time that the network has faced this kind of issue. The first incident of this kind — that affected the block production of the Solana validators — happened on September 14, when the Solana blockchain slowed almost to a crawl due to a resource exhaustion problem, according to the Solana Status account

The blockchain then faced another problem on December 4, when the whole network was stopped, and engineers had to restart it for it to work appropriately again. At that time, the network was halted for approximately 5 hours, with no transactions or blocks being issued during this period.

The project has faced other kinds of issues with congestion due to the release of specific projects that have also crowded the network, as occurred on December 13 when the launch of a project called Solchicks affected the stability of the blockchain.

Then again on January 4th, there were reports about Solana facing a DDoS attack via spam transactions. However, these reports were debunked by Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana, who stated that “there was some congestion due to mismetered transitions, and some users experienced their txs timing out and had to retry.”

However, even with all these problems, the total number of Solana transactions outpaced that of its rivals for December, registering 45 billion transactions.