Anza, a Solana-focused development group, proposed the adoption of Agave v1.18.12, which has a central scheduler feature. The team recommended integrating the software into Solana’s devnet and testnet to tackle the network congestion issue.
The central scheduler increases fee collection while reducing clashing transactions. It aims to permanently solve Solana’s long-running congestion issue.
Anza Wants More Tests for the Central Scheduler on Solana
The proposed Agave v1.18.12 has a central scheduler, which is disabled by default. However, Anza has asked its validators to enable and monitor its performance. This test will help the developers to confirm Agave’s ability to solve congestion problems.
Anza developers stated that the internal tests on the central scheduler are promising. However, the extent of improvement must be evaluated by the validators in production. This implies that the network decongestion must be a collective effort between the developers and validators.
The central scheduler will help scale up the number of transactions processed on Solana. It will also likely prevent congestion since it provides a detailed order for processing transactions.
Data from Anza reveals that using this new scheduler translates to 80% higher fee collection than the previous one. However, the developers believe its performance cannot be predicted until this upgrade is widely adopted on the Solana network.
Notably, Anza has been testing and implementing several means to reduce the high number of failed transactions on Solana. Up to seven out of ten non-voting transactions on Solana failed at some point, which affected network operations.
However, data from the analytical platform Dune reveals a slight improvement. Currently, only six out of every ten non-voting transactions fail.
The proposed improvement feature is still in the testing phase, and no date has been fixed for its implementation on Solana’s mainnet.
Solana engineers and developers continue to brainstorm solutions to tackle network congestion. Solana Foundation’s Head of Developer Relations, Jacob Creech, applauded the latest development.
According to Creech, numerous features on Solana can increase its speed and efficiency, but not everyone understands how the network works.
How Does the Central Scheduler Work?
The proposed Agave v1.18.12 is an upgrade from the previous central scheduler model. It seeks to overcome the previous scheduler’s limitation, which is the tendency to place locks on conflicting transactions. These locks result in slow network speed and inefficiency on the Solana network.
However, the central scheduler uses a new thread called the Scheduling Thread, which increases the number of threads from six to seven.
The Scheduling Thread constantly checks on incoming batches of transactions and processes them as they come. It also redirects them to other threads for further processing of transaction data.