The Solana Foundation regularly releases updates and metrics on the state of the network as part of its commitment to transparency. This is the March 2024 Network Performance Report. Past reports include the previous Network Performance Report in July 2023, the Validator Health Report, and Energy Use Report. The Foundation welcomes input from the Solana community on this report. Fill out this form with questions, feedback, and metrics that you’d like to see tracked. 

Overview

The Solana network’s performance has continued to improve through the past six months (Sept. 1, 2023 - Feb. 29, 2024), as measured by uptime, the ratio of non-voting-to-voting transactions, time to produce a block, and average and max transactions per second. However, the network suffered an outage on Feb. 6, 2024. Solana ecosystem engineers immediately began triaging the situation and were able to push a fix that led to the network restarting in a little less than five hours, indicating a well-prepared and engaged validator community that enables the network to bounce back more quickly in times of emergency. 

There are several new features and developments to highlight on the Solana network since the last network performance report in July 2023, including several announcements from Breakpoint 2023, an annual conference for the Solana community:

Network upgrades to better handle high traffic and demand, including the rollout of QUIC TPU, stake-weighted QoS, and localized fee markets. Since these network upgrades, the network has performed well in periods of high stress.

1.17 update for validators. v1.17 of the Solana Labs validator client includes a number of new features and performance updates that will be activated over time. This includes a ZK proof program that will facilitate performance updates that are expected to reduce transaction latency, reduce resource usage by block-producing validators, and lower startup times for validator restarts.  

Firedancer, a new validator client from Jump Crypto, is live on testnet. This new validator client is built from the ground up in C++ and has shown significant performance improvements.

Token extensions represent the next generation of the SPL token standard. Token extensions represent a comprehensive suite of turnkey solutions tailored to meet the needs of enterprises moving on chain.

Over 60% of stake now runs through the Jito validator client. Jito is a validator software client that launched on mainnet just over a year ago. 

The network continues to be run by a robust group of independent validators around the world. The Solana network is one of the world’s most decentralized proof-of-stake blockchains, and one of the most developed on, with 2500-3000 developers consistently choosing to build on Solana. Read on for a few statistics the Solana Foundation tracks to measure the decentralization and vitality of the Solana network (updated as of Feb. 26, 2024 unless noted otherwise).

Details of network performance

In order for a billion people to use and take advantage of the benefits of the Solana network, users need to feel confident in the network’s overall reliability, including the ability to consistently access the network and safety of funds and information. 

The Foundation is committed to tracking network performance over time through quantitative and qualitative measures. For this report, we highlight four metrics for the sake of simplicity and to allow users to easily track these metrics and how they progress over time. We’ve included these metrics, as well a few others, on a Dune dashboard that makes it easy to dig a layer deeper into the data or run your own analyses. 

Uptime

A constantly reliable network is foundational to the trust and continued growth of the network. 

One of the most important measures of reliability is network uptime, or the percentage of time that the network is successfully running and available to use. 100% uptime within a specific period of time means that there were no errors or incidents that caused the network to be unavailable during that period. 

The Solana network has had 99.94% uptime in the 12 month period previous to the publishing of this report (March 1, 2023 - Feb. 29, 2024). 

Below, we snapshot the network’s monthly uptime, measured as the percentage of uptime in a given month over the past 6 months. 

Average monthly uptime:

September 2023: 100%

October 2023: 100%

November 2023: 100%

December 2023: 100%

January 2024: 100%

February 2024: 99.31%

The network experienced a 4 hour 46 minute outage on Feb. 6, 2024. The outage was caused by a bug in the LoadedPrograms function that led to an infinite loop and halted consensus. This bug had previously been identified and was scheduled to be deployed during the v1.18 release cycle, and instead was deployed immediately upon cluster restart. Importantly, during a network outage, all funds are safe. Anza published a root cause analysis report of the outage on Feb. 9, 2024. 

100% uptime is a consistent goal for the network – this sort of reliability and consistency builds trust for users and potential users that the network will be consistently available for use over time, and if there is downtime, that access will be quickly restored. To that end, it’s important to note that on Solana, time between outages continues to grow. Messari’s Jan. 11, 2024 State of Solana report noted that the period between Feb. 25, 2023 and Dec. 31, 2023 was the network’s longest-ever period without a network interruption, at 309 days. [1]

Block time (time to produce a block)

Block time measures the speed of a single transaction, since it measures how quickly the network adds more “blocks” to the blockchain. In this chart, we see the average time to produce a block, how consistent this metric is, and how it changes over time. 

The spike at the end of February 2023 correlates with the Feb. 25, 2023 network outage, discussed in the previous Network Performance Report. The smaller spike at the end correlates with the Feb. 6, 2024 outage. The consistency in the chart otherwise shows the general stability and speed of the network.

Average and maximum transactions per second

Total transactions per second are the most accurate reflection of the current throughput of the network and demonstrate its potential and growth over time. The benchmark throughput is 65,000 transactions per second, based on simple transactions like sending money from one place to another. Actual transactions per second will differ due to the varied mix of complex transactions on the network, and based on demand at any given moment. An NFT purchase, for example, is much more complex than a simple movement of native tokens across wallets. 

It’s important to note that actual network transactions per second is not a reflection of network capacity, but of demand for transaction throughput. In almost all cases, Solana mainnet-beta is operating below capacity.

The chart below is a snapshot of how well the network is performing in real time. It’s segmented into average transactions per second on a given day, along with maximum transactions per second, split out by date. Average transactions per second have remained relatively similar since December 2022, with some volatility that correlates with high network demand. Notably, other blockchain networks may have seen a recent rise in the number of transactions per second and max transactions per second due to an increase in a specific type of transaction called inscriptions. Inscriptions are a type of NFT that are very simple on a technical transaction level, so they don't take up much blockspace or compute. This can inflate the total number of "transactions" that a blockchain can do, where that number may not fully represent the capacity to fulfill “normal” transactions like token transfers and standard NFT interactions. 

Max transactions per second

Average transactions per second

This chart shows a drop in transactions per second in December 2023-January 2024. Large drops like this are not unexpected, particularly in periods with significant activity. This rise in interest and usage in December 2023 aligns with other charts and information tracked by the Foundation. We can see a similar time pattern emerge in these charts of new wallets created and token extension transactions, for example. 

Users can continue to monitor the performance of the Solana network and use reports like this one to help the community track its development over time. Read more on the latest upgrade to the Solana Labs validator client , as well as the recent fork by Anza. See the release schedule which is available through Github.

Network highlights since the July 2023 report

Network upgrades to better handle high traffic and demand. The network is being continually improved and upgraded to address user needs and technical issues. Many of the recent upgrades, such as QUIC, Stake Weighted QoS, and localized fee markets, were in response to specific points of stress, slowdowns, and outages in periods of high activity and demand. Developers are also continuing to test and develop other network upgrades and initiatives, including increasing maximum transaction sizes (currently limited to 1232 bytes) and simplifying the voting logic, which reduces the overall amount of data needed to be transmitted and stored. 

Release of versions 1.16 and 1.17 of the Solana Labs validator client. Version 1.16 was successfully rolled out in September 2023, and version 1.17 rolled out on Jan. 15, 2024. Both these versions include new features, performance updates, and changes to improve resiliency of the network. 

New features include:

Improved runtime support for zero-knowledge math:

Supports 128 elliptic curve operations (equivalents of EIP-196, EIP-197, and EIP-198).

Support for resizeable program data accounts

The capability to broadcast shreds and do repair over QUIC, which will help transition protocols to QUIC

Token extensions. Solana Labs introduced the original Token Program to define a common implementation for Fungible and Non Fungible tokens, making it easier to introduce and work with tokens on the Solana blockchain. Token extensions, a cross-ecosystem effort introduced to the greater public in January 2024, is an evolution or superset of the original Token Program functionality, making it easy to adopt. By adding different extensions to mints and accounts, token extensions introduce new features not possible or not widely accessible in the original Token program. 

Additional Firedancer progress. Firedancer, a Solana validator client being developed by Jump Crypto, is adding features and getting closer to release to mainnet. At Breakpoint 2023, the Foundation and Jump Crypto announced Firedancer was live on testnet — a big step towards release for all users. Firedancer offers potential performance advantages, and having another validator client in the Solana ecosystem reduces risk via a diversity of code: if one validator client fails or has a major error, other clients could still be available for use because they have a different code base. 

Onchain carbon credits purchases. In April 2023, Solana became the first major smart-contracts blockchain to have its carbon footprint measured in real time; TryCarbonara, an independent startup, launched www.solanaclimate.com to track the network’s impact. In December 2023, the Solana Foundation announced it had offset 100% of the carbon footprint of the network for 2022 via onchain carbon offset purchases. 

Upcoming initiatives 

Solana core developers are consistently working on new network upgrades aimed at strengthening the network in the face of massive user growth and adoption. Follow the status of these upgrades.

Timely vote credits: This is a protocol change and governance initiative carried out mostly by validators. The change penalizes validators for voting on blocks late, incentivizing fast voting and improving the health of consensus. The change has been implemented, testing is happening now, and there will be a governance vote to activate it in the coming weeks. 

SFDP changes: The SFDP (Solana Foundation’s Delegation Program) provides support for validators to become self-reliant and sustainable, with the broader goal of maximizing decentralization, network resiliency, and performance of the network. The Foundation recently announced changes to the program, which supports validators at a higher level early on and less so over time as they grow, with a high performance requirement for the validator. Read more about the delegation program here.

Footnotes

[1] https://messari.io/report/state-of-solana-q4-2023