Why The Drop In TPS?!

At first glance one would think that the TPS is falling off over time, But there are other reasons that affect the monthly TPS average:

• Network Outages ( April, May, June) more than 7 times this year.
• The overall slow momentum in Bearish market.
• Regulatory issues affecting user behavior in network usage

Success Matters

Solana network transactions are atomic as explained above, this is one of the reasons why on average 25% of transactions have failed. This is too much for a blockchain network, There must be reasons for this but with current data we are unable to figure out.

Let’s look at what wallets and programs have failed more in each month.

Solana’s Clumsy Accounts & Programs

We can find the top programs and wallets who have paid the most for failed transactions.

For a transaction to be successful, all of its instructions have to run without errors on all programs or contracts.

Since anyone can sort of rent a space on Solana and run their own program, and call different protocols, there are malicious activity performers who test and try to exploit parts of the network through many trials.

Most of the programs that pay large fees for failed transaction are registered programs.

Notes on the charts:

• Charts shows the first program on instruction stack that failed the transactions
• The wallets who pay the transaction fee are also called the fee account and it is the first signer that authorizes the transaction.
• Both programs and wallets who have been paying the most fees since 2022, on average are paying less fees as time goes.
• There are accounts that are present multiple times in top 10 of most fee payers since 2022. These accounts could be bots.

> ## The Faster, The Better!?

Solana is known for its fast and cheap transactions along with it’s weirdly complicated architecture. Most of the time the faster you go the more likely you will crash, but interestingly enough this is not the case for Solana.

Given that transactions are atomic, meaning that in order for it to be Successful, all the Instructions (Program call specifications) have to be error free.

We see that higher average transaction rate also, somehow, results in higher average success rate. Now there are many factors involved such as major upgrades to the network, extreme bot activity and so on as we’ll see.

> ## The Performance Story

Our analysis takes place from the beginning of 2022, where the greens started to turn red, and ends by July where the markets are bleeding all over.

The speed of the network is most commonly measured in Transactions per Second (TPS). This measurement can be time consuming and a bit complicated, specially for Solana. Fortunately, solana.core.fact_blocks table has made this calculation easier by providing tx_count for each block.

• Success rate is simply calculated as:

  number of successful TXs ÷ Total number of TXs

• Average calculation for TPS is done:

  1. TX count in an hour / 3600 = x
  2. Average x for all hours in a day = y (Daily TPS)
  3. Average y for days in month = z (Monthly TPS)

Final Remarks

There are exciting upgrades coming to the Solana network that will positively impact both the performance and the fees. These upgrades as announced on their site are as follows:

• QUIC (Transfer-protocol change from UDP to QUIC) → Safer Faster & Reliable

• Stake-weighted QoS

• Fee Markets

  Immigrating to QUIC could finally result in higher success rate of transactions due to it mixed UDP and TCP capabilities that enables it to be asynchronous to be fast and controlled for it to be reliable.