Solana Mainnet Beta Update v1.17.31 Released to Address Network Congestion

Solana developers have issued a significant update, version 1.17.31, for the mainnet beta to tackle the persistent network congestion on the Solana blockchain.

Released on April 12, the update has undergone three days of rigorous testing and is now recommended for general use by mainnet beta validators.

The latest patch, a precursor to further enhancements in version 1.18, contains improvements aimed at alleviating network congestion and addressing issues related to the spike in open interest. Some key upgrades include:

• Improved visibility into staked vs. non-staked packets sent down/throttled
• Utilization of smallvec to aggregate chunks in quic, resulting in a saving of one allocation per packet
• Implementation of BankingStage Forwarding Filter
• Tightened minimal streams per 100ms for staked nodes
• Treatment of super low-staked nodes as unstaked in streamer QOS
• Default staked client in LocalCluster

Solana developer Anza has advised validators to upgrade to the latest patch only when the percentage of delinquent stake is below 5%.

On Solana, delinquency refers to inactive validators, and the percentage indicates the total stake held by offline validators. Therefore, validators are urged to install updates only when the network has less than 5% inactive validator stakes.

Additionally, over $1 billion in US Treasuries has been tokenized on-chain, underscoring Solana's growing network activity amid the memecoin frenzy.

Despite facing nearly a week of congestion issues, with a transaction failure rate reaching as high as 75%, Solana co-founder noted that these were attributed to bugs rather than fundamental network issues.

The Solana Foundation attributed the current network congestion problems to factors such as a high demand for Solana block space and delays in implementing patches to address network-related issues.

Austin Federa, Solana Foundation strategy lead, informed Cointelegraph that developers have been working tirelessly to resolve the issue. However, the network's demand has surpassed the developers' ability to intervene promptly.

Nevertheless, Solana developers have introduced a series of patches to address the ongoing issues, with the first batch released today for developers.