Lightspeed Newsletter: Solana begins creating blocks with new ‘scheduler’
The post Lightspeed Newsletter: Solana begins creating blocks with new ‘scheduler’ appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
Today, enjoy the Lightspeed newsletter on Blockworks.co. Tomorrow, get the news delivered directly to your inbox. Subscribe to the Lightspeed newsletter. Howdy! For today’s edition, I dove into Solana’s technical inner workings, which turned my brain into a ball of magma for a few hours. If you need me for the rest of the day, I’ll probably be lying on a couch somewhere, contemplating the meaning of existence. Anyways: How v1.18.15 could make Solana more efficient Solana’s block-creating software just experienced a pretty consequential update, but there’s no way to tell how many validators are actually using it. Over the past week, Solana validators have been upgrading to new software, version 1.18.15. The most important piece here is the creation of a central scheduler meant to make the block creation process more efficient. However, this feature is not enabled by default, and whether validators are using the scheduler can only be discerned through self-reporting. Roughly 90% of validators have upgraded to the new software, and many have reported using the scheduler. The largest Solana validator, Coinbase, is using v1.18, but the firm didn’t return my request for comment on whether they’ve turned on the scheduler. The central scheduler runs an algorithm that looks ahead and plans for incoming transactions to be processed in such a way that they don’t conflict with each other, theoretically making the blockchain more efficient at handling large loads of data. Solana is very concerned with time. The network’s largest time denominator is an epoch, which is roughly equivalent to two days. During every epoch, different validators become leaders for slots of time dependent on how much stake they control. When a validator is the so-called leader, their job is to pack transactions into blocks and broadcast them to the rest of the network. This all happens…
Filed under: News - @ June 13, 2024 10:22 pm