Solana's Anza team has released a new version 1.18.11 update aimed at alleviating the significant congestion issues that have recently plagued the high-speed blockchain.

The team behind one of Solana's primary validator clients has published proposed fixes for the network's transaction processing bottlenecks on the project's devnet. Anza is advising all Solana testnet validators to upgrade to v1.18.11 immediately in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the new code before a likely future mainnet deployment.

"We've released 1.18.11 to devnet with some mitigations for the congestion issues," Anza developers stated in calling for testnet participation. "Validators should update and put it through its paces on your tesnets."

The congestion remedies could not come soon enough for Solana, which has suffered sluggish performance and elevated transaction failure rates in recent weeks due to a deluge of spam transactions flooding the network.

While Solana's unique architecture skips the transaction mempool to boost speed and throughput, it has proven vulnerable to intentional transaction spamming that overwhelms the system and causes processing delays.

Anza previously disclosed it was investigating solutions targeting specific implementation issues with Solana's QUIC data transmission protocol believed to be a key congestion vulnerability.

Prior to Anza's v1.18.11 release, Solana's leading wallet Phantom had already reported transactions success rates climbing from around 20% a week ago to nearly 90% - indicating some initial congestion relief.

However, the Anza team's new mitigations promise more comprehensive fixes by introducing optimizations designed to help validators more efficiently process transaction loads during periods of elevated network usage.

Among the headline changes are updates to how Solana validators batch transactions into "entry" data structures. Improved algorithms aim to reduce costly memory allocations and boost overall compute utilization when dealing with spikes of incoming transactions.

Anza has also implemented caching optimizations, duty-cycle adjustments, and code refactors to further bolster transaction processing throughput and resilience against congestion events.

If proven effective on the public testnets, the v1.18.11 release will give Solana's core developers a viable pathway to rolling out the optimizations to the high-stakes mainnet and finally solving the congestion woes impacting real-world decentralized applications.

While Solana has long touted its ability to process upwards of 65,000 transactions per second at peak capacity, the network has struggled to realize that potential due to architectural bottle necks exposed by malicious spam attacks.

Anza's congestion relief update aims to get Solana back on track to delivering the ultra-high throughput and speedy finality users expect from the platform - without the risks of debilitating traffic bottle necks.

As blockchain scalability and end-user experience grow increasingly vital, validators, developers and node operators are closely monitoring Solana's spam mitigation progress. Seamless congestion handling will likely prove key to cementing the network's status as the performance leader among layer-ones.