What’s the point of Solana reaching 100,000 TPS under ideal conditions?

Recently, Solana has achieved 100,000 TPS under ideal conditions. This article will discuss its experimental background, the reasons for the difference from daily TPS, and how future upgrades such as Firedancer and Alpenglow will systematically improve network performance and decentralization. This article originates from an article written by Chain View, which was compiled, compiled and written by PANews.
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In the past two days, Solana's 100,000 TPS There have been more discussions because @cavemanloverboy did indeed run 100,000+ TPS on the Solana mainnet, but most people did not understand the meaning behind this data:

1) First of all, cavey's experiment was essentially an extreme test under "ideal conditions". This means that this is not the normal performance of the Solana main network. It is different from the laboratory data in the test network environment, but it is not bad.

Because he used a noop (no operation) test program. As the name suggests, it only does the most basic signature verification and directly returns success. It does not perform any calculations, does not change any account status, does not call other programs, and each transaction is only 200 bytes, which is far lower than the 1kb+ of a normal transaction.

This means that this 100,000 TPS test was calculated under an abnormal transaction environment. It tests the ultimate throughput of Solana’s network layer and consensus layer, rather than the actual processing capabilities of the application layer.

2) Another key to the success of this experiment is the Frankendancer validator client. To put it simply, Frankendancer is a "hybrid beta version" of the Firedancer validator being developed by Jump Crypto - grafting Firedancer's completed high-performance components onto the existing Solana validator.

In fact, it uses Wall Street’s high-frequency trading technology stack to reconstruct Solana’s node system, and improves performance through sophisticated memory management, custom thread scheduling and other underlying optimizations. But just by replacing some components, you can achieve a 3-5 times performance improvement.

3) This test experiment shows that Solana can achieve TPS of 100,000+ under ideal conditions, so why is there only 3000-4000 TPS on a daily basis? There are roughly three reasons for a brief summary:

1. Solana’s POH consensus mechanism requires Validators to continuously vote to maintain, and these voting transactions alone occupy more than 70% of the block space, which narrows the performance channel left for normal transactions;

2. Solana’s ecological activities often involve a large number of state competition behaviors, such as Mint’s new NFT or new MEME When publishing, there may be thousands of transactions seizing the write permissions of the same account, resulting in a relatively large proportion of failed transactions;

3. In order to grab MEV interests, arbitrage robots in the Solana ecosystem may send a large number of invalid transactions, which is a waste of resources.

4) However, the upcoming full deployment of Firedancer and the consensus upgrade of Alpenglow will systematically solve these problems.

One of the key points of the Alpenglow consensus upgrade is to transfer voting transactions off-chain, which is equivalent to releasing 70% of the space for normal transactions. At the same time, it can reduce the confirmation time to 150 milliseconds, making Solana's DEX experience infinitely close to CEX. In addition, the activation of the local fee market can also avoid the embarrassing situation of network-wide congestion caused by the popularity of a single program Fomo.

In addition to performance optimization and improvement, the key benefit of Firedancer is to achieve client diversity, allowing Solana to have multiple clients such as Geth and Nethermind like Ethereum, which directly improves decentralization and single-point node failure.

Above.

So, in the discussion of Solana’s 100,000 TPS, those who are knowledgeable see the confidence in Solana’s future upgraded client and consensus protocol, while those who are not knowledgeable are trying to rely on the TPS arms race to boost Solana’s momentum (although the TPS competition is outdated), but it is quite rewarding to understand the meaning behind the experiment. Here, I will popularize the knowledge and share it with you.