Solana releases new mainnet version 1.8.14; more upgrades are soon to follow

Solana officially admits to a ‘performance degradation’ after being hit by a series of network instability recently for two or three days. In a report released by Solana status via Twitter, it said that the Solana mainnet beta is experiencing high levels of network congestion and that the current issue faced by validators is due to excessive duplicate transactions.

In an effort to mitigate the issue, the report states that Engineers have just released the 1.8.14 version. According to the report, the upcoming releases are aimed at improving the state of the network, with more improvements expected to debut in the next 8-12 weeks. Many of these features are currently live on Testnet, where they are being rigorously tested, the report added.

In a series of tweets, the report explains that the previous version 1.8.12 was specifically aimed at improving issues of program cache exhaustion, which are largely responsible for the recent performance degradations.

Asserting that developers have made a significant amount of progress on this, but the work is still not completed. Pointing out that the last 24 hours are a testimony to the fact that the systems still need to be improved in order to meet the demands of users and support the more complex transactions on the network.

Solana network woes continue to haunt

Solana despite being trumpeted as the potential alternative to Ethereum has suffered network outages in the recent past. The first such incident of this kind was reported on September 14, 2021, when the blockchain slowed down owing to a resource exhaustion problem, according to the Solana Status account.

The blockchain suffered yet another outage on December 4, when the Mainnet Beta network stopped producing blocks that prevented new transactions from being confirmed, and engineers had to restart it to resume working.

Again on January 4th, 2022, there were reports about a DDoS attack via spam transactions on the Solana network. However, Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana debunked those reports, stating that “there was some congestion due to mismetered transitions, and some users experienced their txs timing out and had to retry.”

Then on January 6, 16:11 UTC, the Solana network experienced performance degradation affecting the throughput of the system and causing it to drop certain transactions.