Solana developers tackle bugs hoping to prevent further outages
Solana developers have tackled the “durable nonce transaction” bug that knocked the network offline for the fifth time this year earlier this month as network activity slows.
Developers have fixed the runtime bug that caused the latest outage of the Solana network on June 1.
According to a report published by Solana Labs on June 5, Solana’s fifth outage of 2022 was caused by a bug in the “durable nonce transactions feature” which caused the network to stop producing blocks for roughly four and half hours.
“The durable nonce transaction feature was disabled in releases v1.9.28/v1.10.23 to prevent the network from halting if the same situation were to arise again.”
“Durable nonce transactions will not process until the mitigation has been applied, and the feature re-activated in a forthcoming release,” they added.
The term durable nonce transactions refers to a type of transaction on Solana that is designed to not expire, unlike a normal transaction on the network which usually has a short lifetime of around 2 minutes before a blockhash becomes too old to be validated.
It is generally used to support transactions tied to avenues such as custodial services which require more time than the usual “to produce a signature for the transaction” according to Solana Documentation.
Solana Labs noted that durable nonce transactions require a separate “mechanism to prevent double processing, and are processed serially,” however a runtime bug presented itself after a durable nonce transaction was processed as a regular transaction and failed, but was then re-submitted again and resulted in the network grinding to a halt.
“After the failed transaction was processed, but before the nonce was used again, the user resubmitted the same transaction for processing. This resubmission activated the bug in the runtime,“ the p report reads.
3 comments