Solana’s outage raises questions about customer diversity and beta status.
The Solana network experienced a major outage on February 6 at 10:22 am UTC, with block production halting for more than five hours before validators restarted the network.
This isn't the first time Solana has gone down. Since January 2022, Solana has seen nearly half a dozen significant outages and fifteen days of partial or major delays.
Engineers from across the ecosystem are investigating the outage on mainnet-beta. This series will be updated as more information https://t.co/rfeioQ6BG9 becomes available.
— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) February 6, 2024
The incidents range in severity from partial to total network outages, and their causes include software vulnerabilities in the network and denial of service and resource depletion attacks.
Posthumous
Solana's postmortem of the latest outage, which occurred on February 9, detailed the cause and how verifiers restarted the network. Solana's Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation, which completes all programs before committing a transaction, had a cache problem, the report said.
Previously, GIT caching was implemented with “ExecutorsCache”, but with the v1.16 release, ExecutorsCache was replaced by a new implementation called “LoadedPrograms”. The new Loader program uses the mathematical information stored in the program's chain calculator to find the most recent transmission position and calculates the effective position height.
However, this loader program suffers from an old loader problem, whereby the GIT cache experiences a loop with old programs, causing them to repeatedly complete their instructions instead of efficiently accessing and executing them. This crash caused a network outage as the system went into an infinite loop, unable to process transactions or move forward.
Austin Federa, Solana's head of strategy, told Cointelegraph that there was a process to replace the old loading system with a new engine system, but it was planned to be disabled in the updated version.
“It looks like someone deliberately invoked that old set of instructions, long since deprecated but still in the codebase. Run into cases where the JIT compiler can't find what it's looking for. And that's what created the endless cycle.”
Solana engineers quickly discovered and fixed the problem, updated system processes, and identified these outdated programs to prevent future integration cycles. This solution involves reducing the cumbersome deployment of legacy loaders to ensure that all program instructions can be accessed correctly and efficiently without falling into the recompilation trap.
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Some critics say that contributing to Solana's disruption is a lack of customer diversity, which leads to centralized points of failure. Kadan Stadelman, chief technology officer of open-source decentralized exchange platform Comodo, told Cointelegraph that Solana's developers and verifiers are deploying code faster than maintaining perfect network timing.
The main reason is centralization and lack of authenticating customer options. Solana's high demand for high traffic and low transaction time puts a huge strain on its infrastructure, making it vulnerable to performance degradation and outages.
However, Federa points out that Solana has a more precise architecture and explains that only two modern contract networks worldwide have independent validator clients: Ethereum and Solana. Solana currently has a single core authentication client built on a functional code base.
“Solana has never been discontinued because of a compatibility error or something along those lines. The problems have always been implementation details. It's always been a bug somewhere in the application layer, which isn't better or worse. It's just an essential kind of precision,” Austin explained.
The “Beta” saga of Solana's mainnet
The Solana blockchain was launched in March 2020, and over the next four years, the network made significant strides in the decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem. Solana has become the fifth largest DeFi chain by total value locked, with more than $1.7 billion in capital allocated to various on-chain protocols. Its native Solana (SOL) token has a market cap of nearly $49 billion, making it the fifth largest cryptocurrency.
Despite its impressive history, Solana never officially made it out of its beta stage. It is mentioned that the ban is still in Wananet beta. Beta is a term that refers to software that is being tested by a group of users before its official launch.
However, the Solana blockchain is open to everyone, with hundreds of decentralized applications used to launch various products. The blockchain ecosystem boasts an active non-fungible token (NFT) ecosystem.
Solana ran a short private and public beta test before releasing v1.0 four years ago, and today the network processes more transactions than most other chains.
Although the code is still being changed, Solana is more than a beta software. A persistent misconception is a mix of misconceptions surrounding pre-launch testing and post-launch software maturity and the Solana message.
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The beta state of the blockchain has attracted a lot of criticism, especially in light of the outages of the past two years. Crypto users on social media mock the status of Solana's main blockchain, which often changes to mainnet beta and back, depending on whether the chain is down or not.
Solana is a joke. time.
How many stops have there been in the past months? “It's beta” is no longer an excuse. $SOL #Solana pic.twitter.com/IjvRaM58dZ
— David Miller ⬡ (@CryptoDavid_) May 1, 2022
Federa notes that most blockchain systems today are in beta, and that perhaps the only fully-fledged mainnets are Bitcoin and Ethereum.
“It will take a long time for the software systems to stabilize and become feature-complete because important new features are being shipped on the Solana network. I think we're probably nearing the end of that beta phase. From a technology perspective, one of the milestones for that is the launch of a second independent authentication client.”
Many DeFi fans believe that Solana's vacation is only a means to his goal of becoming a competitor to Ethereum. Still, the developers have worked to ensure that bugs from the past won't affect the network in the future. Despite the history of the dirty vacation, high speed and low cost play a key role in attracting new projects to the platform.
