The v1.17.31 release is now recommended for general use by MainnetBeta validators. This release contains enhancements which will help alleviate the ongoing congestion on the Solana Network.
Update on #Solana extreme load induced RPC networking issue which is in the process of being fixed.
Solana has faced the largest spike in traffic in history over the last weeks. This test has uncovered issues under high load where spam (lots of fake transactions) can be used by network participants to benefit with no consequences. By sending spam transactions participants can block other participants from accessing the chain. Therefore they have full access to the chain and others get failures. This explains the UI experience in the last 2 days during the attacks. Your requests are not even reaching Solana blockchain, they are being blocked in the RPC networking layer, specifically in the QUIC implementation, by participants throwing large numbers of transactions at the RPCs and blocking actual user requests. btw:QUIC is a protocol introduced by @Google in 2012 to enable high speed network communication.
Note: When you are shown the high percentage of failed transaction charts, this is because user transactions are being blocked by the spammed RPCs while they transact on the blockchain. Once their spamming attack is finished user transactions resume and performance goes back to normal.
As per usual Solana and its ecosystem dev community has already found fixes that will will de-incentivize this spamming behavior.
Remember - you can only test a software system under real load. This is part of beta testing. Without the liveness testing of this load, you cant test for these edge cases, so dont compare it to other chains or networks which have never experienced 1/10 of this volume. They are untested and will have their own edge case issues when they get there. It is important to note this excercise will benefit all networks and they are all watching this and will implement similar controls to avoid the same issues within their particular implementation.
Solana validator builder @anza_xyz published a great update on this progress.
Fixes are already on the way. We are all testing blockchains in preparation for a billion users, and these tests are critical to uncover these issues before we get there.
Let the haters flood the comments and the technology investors come to my defense.