Solana Labs mentioned that the current outage that halted blockchain transactions for 5 hours on Feb. 6 was attributable to a bug builders caught every week earlier.
Solana Labs printed an in depth report on Feb. 9 outlining its investigation of the outage, which revealed that the recognized bug had a number of triggers, and builders had solely deployed a repair for considered one of them when the outage occurred.
Root trigger
Although earlier reviews partially recognized the problem, the newest report supplies a technical motive for the outage and states {that a} “deploy-evict-request cycle of a legacy loader program triggered an infinite recompile loop within the JIT cache.”
Merely put, Solana’s transaction course of entered an infinite loop attributable to a bug.
The related bug solely affected model 1.17 of Solana’s validator shopper and was not current in model 1.16 of the shopper. Nonetheless, nearly all validators stalled as a result of 95% of the cluster stake was operating 1.17 on the time of the affected block.
The newest report additionally reveals that builders had recognized the bug as the reason for an outage on Solana’s devnet one week earlier. Builders had already patched one doable set off for the bug when the outage occurred and subsequently sped the discharge of a patch for the second set off.
The repair is in model 1.17.20 of the shopper; builders intend to launch a extra full repair sooner or later, based on the report.
Solana has skilled quite a few outages
Solana has recurrently attracted controversy for its outages, which occurred regularly in its earlier days.
In accordance with information from CryptoManiaks, Solana has skilled 9 outages since September 2021, with over 150 hours of downtime — excluding the newest outage this week.
Till the newest incident, the community didn’t have an outage for nearly one 12 months. Its earlier outage occurred in February 2023 and lasted 18 hours.
Solana (SOL) costs have greater than recovered since the latest Feb. 6 incident, which triggered SOL to hit a six-day low of $93.75. The token was buying and selling at $105.46 as of press time, up 2.4% over the previous 24 hours.
Editor’s Word: Though Solana Labs confirmed the small print of the outage by itself web site, the report was initially authored and printed by Anza co-founder Jeff Washington — a former engineer at Solana Labs.
