Solana Battling Persistent Outages While Maintaining Strong DeFi Presence
Summary:
Solana network suffered a serious outage on February 6, stopping block production for over five hours before the network was restarted by validators. This is not the first time Solana faced such issues, having recorded several significant outages since January 2022. The reasons varied from software vulnerabilities to denial-of-service attacks. An investigation is currently underway to determine the cause of the recent outage. Despite these issues, Solana has maintained a significant presence in the decentralized finance ecosystem, ranking as the fifth largest DeFi chain. However, notwithstanding its accomplishments, criticisms persist due to the network's continued beta status.
On February 6, the Solana network came to a grinding halt for over five hours starting at 10:22 am UTC due to a major disruption, before network validators successfully rebooted it. Solana's performance record since January 2022 has been less than stellar, with over a dozen significant outages and around fifteen days of complete or partial network shutdowns. Investigations are currently underway by engineers from across the network to identify the reasons behind the latest mainnet-beta disruption.
Ranging from partial to complete crashes, the outages have been spawned by a number of causes such as network software vulnerabilities, denial-of-service attacks and resource exhaustion attacks. Following the recent downtime, Solana published a detailed account on February 9, revealing the cause and remedial measures taken to reboot the network. This narrative divulged that Solana’s Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation cache that processes all programs pre-transaction execution, was hit by a bug.
Previously, the JIT cache operated with “ExecutorsCache," which was swapped for a new implementation known as "LoadedPrograms" in the v1.16 release. Borrowing accounting details from a program's on-chain account, the new loader program retrieves its most recent deployment slot which is then used to compute the functional slot height. But, this caused the JIT cache to get caught up in a loop with older programs, compelling it to recompile repeatedly instead of successfully accessing and performing their instructions. The system was crippled by this glitch, and was sent into an endless cycle that prevented transaction processing.
Meanwhile, Austin Federa, Solana's Head of Strategy, conveyed that an older instruction set had been invoked and that while a scheme was in place to replace the older loader system, this complication occurred before the solution could be implemented. He detailed that the JIT compiler tripped up when it couldn’t locate what it needed, triggering the infinite loop. Solana's engineering team has since rectified the issue, upgraded the system's processes and tagged these older programs to prevent future recompilation cycles.
Furthermore, he stressed that Solana as a smart contract network possesses independent validator clients paralleled only by Ethereum, which is more precise in its current architecture. He also pointed out that all the problems faced were rooted in implementation details rather than consensus faults.
Since its initiation in March 2020, Solana has come a long way and established a strong presence in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem to rank as the fifth-largest DeFi chain with over $1.7 billion pledged to a variety of on-chain protocols. Despite its impressive feats, Solana continues to remain in its beta phase and is yet to launch officially. A product typically graduates from its beta phase, where a select group tests nearly finished software, after its official release, however, this has not been the case with Solana. Even though it is open to everyone with hundreds of decentralized applications in use to launch various products and a thriving nonfungible token (NFT) ecosystem, its beta status has often drawn criticism, especially in light of its previous outages.
But, according to Federa only Bitcoin and Ethereum could probably be deemed as complete mainnets while the rest of most blockchain systems remain in beta. He also stated that it might not be long before Solana steps out of its beta phase. A lot of DeFi proponents see Solana's spotty uptime as a significant hurdle to become a potential rival for Ethereum however, its competitive advantage lies in the high speed and low costs that keep attracting new projects to the network.
Published At
2/27/2024 5:03:26 PM
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