In 2022, the blockchain has seen 10 partial or complete outages as well as poor block times, and the co-founder of Solana said that this is “not the experience we want to deliver.”
According to Solana SOL 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 during the Breakpoint 2022 annual conference in Lisbon, Portugal, Yakovenko spoke on the history and future of the blockchain, emphasising that the network had encountered challenges in the last year:
“We’ve had a lot of challenges over the last year, I would say this whole last year has been all about reliability.”
According to its own status reporting, Solana has had 10 partial or complete outages, the most prominent of which occurred between January 6 and 12, 2022, when network problems caused partial outages and poor service for 8 to 18 hours. The most recent “major outage” occurred on October 1 and lasted approximately six and a half hours.
Solana had a clock drift in late May and early June due to longer-than-average slot times (also known as block times), the period of time during which a validator may deliver a block to Solana.
Solana’s ideal slot time is usually 400 milliseconds, but Yakovenko said, “Things got really, really bad in June. Block times went up to over a second, which is really slow for Solana.” He also said that in some cases, “confirmation times are taking 15 to 20 seconds.”
“That’s not the experience that we want to deliver and that’s a pretty bad Web2 experience when you’re competing with Google with Facebook with all these other applications.”
Yakovenko said that following a recent upgrade and the validator count increasing over the previous year, Solana is well on its way to overcoming network speed difficulties, and he added:
“[We’re] in a constant fight between performance, security, throughput, and decentralisation, all of these problems […] whenever you improve one you may actually hurt some of the other ones but I think we’ve done an amazing job in solving a bunch of those.”
“Obviously we still have challenges with outages and bugs,” he added, adding the company’s August cooperation with Web3 development firm Jump Crypto to construct Solana’s scaling solution Firedancer — branded the long-term solution to the network outage problem — might be the answer.
“Having a second implementation and a second client built by a different team with a fully separate code base, the probability of the same kind of bug existing in both is virtually zero.”
