Transaction Inclusion Delays

Update 2/6 01:30 UTC

Overview
We are actively scaling to meet elevated demand. While immediate infrastructure updates are underway to improve current throughput, we have also initiated several longer-term projects to ensure future stability and network performance.

What we did today
We’re landing changes to improve the RPC latency for eth_sendRawTransaction calls during load, and improve the efficiency of getting transactions to the block builder for selection:

* [Live on Mainnet] - Doubled the disk IO throughput of our txpool
* [Live on Mainnet] - Changed our `eth_sendRawTransaction` rate limiting window to smooth out incoming spikes. We will continue changing the rate limiting configuration in the coming days
* Built and tested a more stable routing algorithm for sending transactions to the most efficient backend. We expect this to be on Mainnet within a couple of days

What’s up next
This work is expected to take 4 to 6 weeks. We anticipate this work to achieve stable transaction inclusion and block production
* Implementing a transaction propagation redesign that removes the overhead of P2P when getting transactions to the block builder.
* Optimizing and scaling configurations for `pending` and `queued` storage of transactions
* Unifying the components of our block building, sequencing, and flashblocks streaming

We will share updates here as we make progress.

We are experiencing heavy transaction volume resulting in inclusion delays. Active fixes are in progress

We are actively monitoring network conditions. During periods of high congestion, users may experience intermittent transaction delays or transactions dropped. Submitted transactions can occasionally take up to two minutes to be included in a block or may need to be resubmitted.  We are working on longer-term fixes to ameliorate this behavior and will share our plans and updates as we make progress.