Solana releases network performance report: TPS surges, network runs smoothly

Recently, the Solana Foundation released the Solana Network Performance Report. The report discloses a series of indicators about the network status of Solana, and reviews the operation status, performance parameters, energy usage, etc. of the Solana network in the past half a year.

In October 2022, Solana published a previous report and sought community input on this report. Regular disclosures are also seen as part of its commitment to transparency.

According to this report, network uptime has remained at 100% since February 25. The average TPS has remained stable since December 2022. The maximum TPS is growing steadily and will increase significantly in the second half of 2022.

In addition, Solana has launched a number of new features, including QUIC TPU, stake-weighted QoS, localized fee markets, and more.

The launch of the new NFT technical structure "state compression" is quite bright. This feature can greatly reduce the cost of NFT casting by several orders of magnitude. It only takes 50 SOL to mint 100 million NFTs. State compression was developed for NFTs but can be used in other applications, which could bring more use cases to the Solana network.

In April 2023, the migration of the Helium network to the Solana network was successfully completed in a smooth and seamless process.

**The following is the original text of the report. **

Summarize

The performance of the Solana network will improve in the first half of 2023. Specifically, its status is measured by parameters such as uptime, voting transaction ratio, block time, TPS, etc.

Since the last network performance report in October 2022, the Solana network has undergone several major improvements, including:

• v1.14 was successfully released on the main network. An improvement has been made following a network outage on February 25th (during the last software upgrade). Since February 25, the network has experienced 100% uptime.
• Network upgrade to better handle high traffic. Launched measures such as QUIC TPU, equity-weighted QoS, and localized charging market. Since the network upgrade, the network has performed well during periods of high stress (such as during the MadLads NFT minting).
• Introducing state compression, a new method of storing data directly on-chain that reduces costs by orders of magnitude. Minting 100 million NFTs on Solana is now just 50 SOL.

The Solana network continues to be run by a strong set of independent validators around the world. It is one of the most decentralized PoS blockchains in the world and one of the most developed. Below, we provide some statistics tracked by the Solana Foundation to measure the decentralization and vitality of the Solana network (data as of July 11, 2023):

(Note: These numbers represent the number of nodes, not independent operators. It is not possible to confirm how many independent validators or RPC operators there are.)

Network performance overview

In order for a billion people to take advantage of the Solana Network, users need to have confidence in the overall reliability of the network: the ability to continuously access the network, the accuracy of information about the network, the speed of transactions, and the security of funds and information.

Here are some metrics the Foundation tracks to see how the network measures this. For simplicity, we focus on four metrics and allow users to easily track these metrics and their progress over time. We've included these metrics and others on the Dune dashboard, making it easy for you to drill down into the data layers or run your own analysis yourself.

Uptime

A consistently reliable network is the foundation of web trust and continued growth. One of the most important measures of reliability is network uptime.

We snapshot the monthly uptime of the network, measured as the uptime percentage for a given month over the past 6 months.

Voting transaction rate

Voting transactions are necessary to the functioning of the network because they create the decentralized consensus that blockchains rely on. Voting transactions occur when validators vote to confirm one or more proposed blocks. Non-voting transactions are transactions triggered by user actions on the blockchain. For example, a non-voting transaction might represent an NFT mint or a user transfer of tokens from one wallet to another. The network needs a certain number of voting transactions to reach consensus, but over time we expect to see the ratio of voting to no-voting transactions decrease, as the overall percentage of voting transactions should decrease as the network becomes more efficient.

Below is the ratio of voting to no-voting transactions over the past six months.

Block Time

Block time measures the speed of a single transaction as it measures how quickly the network adds more "blocks" to the blockchain. In this graph, we see the average time to produce a block, the consistency of this metric, and how it changes over time.

The peak in late February was associated with a network outage on 25 February.

Average and maximum TPS

TPS most accurately reflects the current processing capacity of the network and demonstrates its potential to grow over time. The benchmark is 65,000 transactions per second. Actual TPS will vary due to different combinations of complex transactions on the network, and based on demand at any given moment. For example, NFT purchases are much more complex than simply moving native tokens between wallets.

It is important to note that TPS does not reflect network capacity, but the demand for the number of transactions. In almost all cases, mainnet betas are running below capacity.

The graph below is a snapshot of the real-time performance of the network. It is divided into average TPS for a given date, and maximum TPS, split by date. Average TPS has remained relatively similar since December 2022, with some volatility associated with high network demand. Since January 2022, the maximum TPS has been increasing steadily, with a large increase in the second half of 2022, which is related to the new network upgrade.

Network highlights since October 2022 report

In 2022, the Solana network experienced several slowdowns or outages during periods of high activity, such as during large NFT minting. In response, the core developers rolled out network upgrades including QUIC, Stake-weighted QoS, and localized fee markets. Since rolling out these upgrades, the network has performed extremely well during times of high stress, such as the MadLads NFT minting. The developers are also continuing to test and develop other network upgrades and plans, including increasing the maximum transaction size (currently limited to 1232 bytes) and simplifying the voting logic, thereby reducing the total amount of data that needs to be transferred and stored.

• QUIC TPU: QUIC is a network protocol designed by Google for fast asynchronous communication, but with session and flow control. QUIC can be used to limit the traffic from any one participant, allowing the network to focus on truly valid transactions. QUIC has been added to the port that introduces user transactions.
• Stake-weighted QoS: Stake weighting is used to efficiently allocate leader network bandwidth. Instead of accepting first-come, first-served transactions indiscriminately, it provides access to transmission information, so nodes with 0.5% of the stake will have the right to transmit at least 0.5% of the packets to the leader. This can improve the resiliency of the network by suppressing spam or malicious actors. Stake-weighted QoS has been added to QUIC TPU ports.
• Localized fee markets: Fee markets provide a way for users to add additional fees to their transactions to express urgency compared to other transactions. Priority fees are calculated based on the amount of computing resources the transaction is expected to require. For example, a simple token transfer would require a lower total priority fee than an NFT mint expressing the same level of urgency. This process makes markets more efficient by allowing users to express a sense of urgency and prioritize transactions.

Improved upgrade process: In response to the February 25th network outage, Solana Labs CEO Anatoly Yakovenko published a blog post proposing a new process for software releases to make the upgrade process more resilient to new upgrades in the face of network expansion. These include bringing additional external developers and auditors into the release process to test and find bugs, improving the server restart process, emphasizing focus on network stability, and forming adversarial teams. Some of these proposals are already in effect, including:

Comprehensive upgrade process on testnet: In order to simulate the upgrade process, the testnet is now downgrading to the previous software version first, and then simulating the software upgrade process that will be launched on the mainnet. Before that, the testnet was a minor version of the mainnet when the mainnet was upgraded.

** Optimize tools for manual restarts: ** For example, an initial design is in place to automate some of the more mechanical steps (SIMD 0046).

Adversarial tests are being run against private clusters and testnets: These tests are being run in an ad-hoc fashion today as core engineers work to construct a more formal test plan. Relatedly, the Solana Labs validator reference client now has an adversarial port, and core lab engineers are adding the ability to configure scenarios that can be used to build adversarial tests.

Smooth release of 1.14.17: Version 1.14 was considered officially adopted on May 22, when over 66.6% of stakers had upgraded to 1.14. This is the first major network upgrade since the February 25 outage, and the rollout of the improved upgrade schedule mentioned above. As of May 30, version 1.14 of the Solana validator client was adopted by 97.4% of the shares on the Solana network.

**Compression NFT and state compression: **Compression NFT is now live on the Solana mainnet beta. Compressed NFTs are cheaper to operate than uncompressed NFTs, by a factor of 2400-24000. Minting 100 million NFTs on Solana is now just 50 SOL. This new NFT technology structure is called "state compression". State compression unlocks many new use cases and expands the potential impact of blockchain by making NFTs usable for use cases such as sending messages or enhancing customer loyalty programs. State Compression was developed for NFTs, but can be used for other applications. In a nutshell, state compaction involves storing some data on the blockchain that would otherwise be stored on each machine.

Smooth Helium Migration: In April 2023, the migration of the Helium network to the Solana network was successfully completed in a process that was relatively seamless for Helium network participants and without major disruption to the Solana network. Helium's migration utilizes state compression to mint NFTs, which is more efficient and cheaper than other means.

**Other developments on Firedancer:**Firedancer is a Solana validator client developed by Jump Crypto, and more components are being added and tested.

• QUIC implementation demo: Firedancer recently did a demo of a high-performance QUIC implementation, which should lead to more efficient data transactions.
• Reed-Solomon Erasure Coding release: Turbine is a mechanism in a validator responsible for distributing "shards" (block fragments) to other validators in the cluster. Reed-Solomon is an error-correcting encoding scheme that helps to accurately encode data within these shards before transmitting it to other validators.

**Tinydancer:**Tinydancer is the first light client on Solana, developed as part of the Solana Foundation's Grizzlython Hackathon. Light clients are software clients that can run locally on simple devices such as laptops, connecting to full nodes in the network to verify the state of the ledger and check for invalid state transitions.

Real-time emissions monitoring: In April 2023, Solana became the first major smart contract blockchain to measure carbon footprint in real time. Indie startup TryCarbonara launched to track the impact of the web.

Network challenges since October 2022

Since the last network performance report in October 2022, the Solana network has experienced an outage. There was no loss of user funds in this incident.

February 2023 Outage: On February 25th, the mainnet Beta began experiencing lengthy block finality times. After investigation, the cause was traced to several services on the network running custom block forwarding software, which inadvertently transmitted large amounts of data, equivalent to several orders of magnitude larger than ordinary blocks. The network's deduplication logic cannot handle this situation, overwhelming the Turbine protocol and significantly reducing network performance. After diagnosing this issue, core engineers created enhancements to the deduplication logic, which are now implemented starting with Solana Labs validator client v1.13.7 and v1.14.17. This will also be mitigated by the long-term Solana protocol design to replace all UDP-based network protocols with QUIC, which will better enforce the constraints in Turbine. Read the full outage report here.

Several proposed network upgrades have been implemented or are being rolled out to address the cause of this outage, notably the implementation of QUIC, fee markets, and stake-weighted Quality of Service (QoS).

Upcoming Initiatives

Solana core developers have been working on a number of new network upgrades aimed at strengthening the network in the face of massive user growth and adoption.

These Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs) are proposed design documents on how to make changes to the network that need to be coordinated across multiple core development teams. One SIMD that has recently been accepted is SIMD-33: timely vote credits, awarded based on the number of slots voted for, with more rewards for low-latency votes. This is intended to reduce block finalization times and discourage intentionally delayed voting.

The latest version contains some network upgrades, but these features have not been activated yet. New features greatly improve network latency. The new version also allows users to undelegate nodes on the network that are delinquent in their pledge, reducing skip rates and improving performance. (Note: Undelegated staking accounts are still controlled by the original stakers and are free to re-delegate to active validators or withdraw their funds).

Users can continue to monitor the performance of the Solana network and help the community track its development over time through Solana network reports.