Solana developers have recently launched a new version of their mainnet beta, v1.17.31, to address the ongoing network congestion on the Solana blockchain. The update, which was released on April 12, was tested for three days before being recommended for general use by mainnet beta validators.

The latest patch includes enhancements to alleviate some of the network congestion issues, with further improvements expected in v1.18. Among the key upgrades are the ability to view staked versus non-staked packets sent down or throttled, the use of smallvec to aggregate chunks and save allocations, and a BankingStage Forwarding Filter.

Additionally, the update includes tighter restrictions on the minimal streams per 100ms for staked nodes and the treatment of super low staked nodes as unstaked in streamer QOS. The default staked client in LocalCluster is also a notable addition.

Solana developer Anza has advised validators to install the update only when there are less than 5% inactive validator stakes on the network, which refers to the percentage of total stake for offline validators.

The Solana network has been facing congestion issues for nearly a week, with a transaction failure rate as high as 75%. While developers were working on a fix, co-founder Solana noted that the issues were merely a bug rather than a network problem.

The Solana Foundation has attributed the current network congestion problems to various factors, including high demand for Solana block space and delayed implementation of patches to tackle network-related issues.

Strategy lead Austin Federa of the Solana Foundation told Cointelegraph that developers have been working non-stop to fix the issue, but network demand has outpaced timely developer intervention. However, Solana devs have developed a series of patches to tackle the ongoing issue, with the first released earlier today for developers.