Solana’s network had a new problem and was offline for a few hours again
3 min read
The Solana network faced new technical difficulties on Wednesday (1). This time, the problems caused a new outage on the network. For nearly seven hours, no blocks or transactions were processed on Solana.
When the outage occurred, the team rushed to identify what the problem was. Then, Solana’s Twitter profile confirmed the outage and said that the validators had restarted the network’s activities.
It was the twelfth ten that Solana’s network had problems in 2022. That is, the network has an average of two problems each month, counting the failure of Wednesday.
New problem halts transactions
According to block explorer Solana Beach, Solana’s network experienced major instability at 1pm on Wednesday. As a result, users were unable to send transactions for exactly 6 hours and 48 minutes.
Solana Status reported the issue on Twitter less than three hours ago and urged all validators to be prepared for a network reset. Coincidentally, validators had to take the same measure in early May, as CriptoFácil reported.
At that time, Solana also stopped producing blocks for seven hours. The release of a collection of NFTs that overloaded the network caused the problem, according to the network. Users performed millions of transactions per second (TPS), far beyond the network’s capacity.
However, the excess demand did not cause the failure on Tuesday, but a problem in the blocks. The nodes started to generate different results for the same block. This, in turn, crashed the validation of the blocks, causing instability.
“A bug in the durable nonce transactions feature led to non-determinism, when nodes generated different results for the same block. This impeded the advancement of the network”, explained the developers.
To remedy the issue, engineers will release an update that will temporarily disable the nonce transaction durable feature. That way, the feature will serve as a stopgap solution until the team develops something definitive.
While the flaw was serious, it did not affect users’ funds, which remain safe. However, no validator was able to create blocks and, as a result, no user can perform transactions. Blocks are currently being validated normally and there are no signs of a problem.
Failure sequence
Created to be one of the main competitors of Ethereum, Solana became the target of constant failures in the processing of transactions. Outages for hours at a time are the most common of these problems; in fact, the network experienced its first drop in less than a month.
In September, Solana experienced a similar outage due to “resource exhaustion”. This caused a denial of service across the network, which did not process blocks.
Another problem occurred in January, when the network suffered a major slowdown. Transactions were not interrupted, but the network experienced slowness in its transaction flow.
Finally, the network experienced a failure a week ago, which affected Proof of History (PoH). As a result, Solana started recording blocks 30 minutes later than real time.
Typically, Solana can process 2,000 TPS, but this number can be as high as 50,000 TPS. This scalability creates faster and cheaper transfers – that’s when they’re processed.
On the other hand, Ethereum continues to operate without major failures.
