Making Solana fast: from 33% skip rates to 100M compute unit blocks
Alessandro Decina from Anza joins Pirates Parley to break down how the Agave validator client went from constant congestion and 33% skip rates to 100 million compute-unit blocks, 200-millisecond slots, and the Alpenglow consensus rewrite.
Alessandro spent 15 years in open-source multimedia and audio-video streaming, wrote one of the early XDP packet-processing implementations in C, and then added eBPF support to the Rust compiler.
That work pulled him into Solana, where he now leads performance at Anza on Agave.
They cover:
Skip rate falling from 33% to 0.5% by version 2.3, and outages becoming a non-event The TPU rewrite to QUIC, stake-weighted QoS and why early spam still got through Why one syscall per packet caps throughput, and how XDP writes straight to the network card The invalidator is an internal team that attacks the cluster to surface the next bottleneck Rewriting parts of the Turbine with XDP so that much larger blocks can propagate Block size moving from 60 million to 100 million compute units, with headroom for more Shorter 200 millisecond slots targeted for the 4.2 release around the end of July Shrinking the leader ingest window from 30 seconds to 2.5 seconds with help from RPC providers Why Alpenglow matters most for deleting years of fragile consensus code A candid take on whether running two clients really improves security The Firedancer rivalry and the offsite that made him commit to making Agave faster His five-year vision of open source, permissionless global finance
Triton One: triton.one/pricing Alessandro Decina: x.com/alessandrod Anza: anza.xyz
Making Solana fast: from 33% skip rates to 100M compute unit blocks
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