Network Congestion

A state in which the volume of transaction submissions to Solana leaders exceeds available block space or processing capacity, causing elevated transaction drop rates, increased time-to-confirmation, and rising priority fee requirements to land. Congestion is typically account-local (concentrated around hot accounts like popular DEX pools or NFT mints) rather than global, reflecting Solana's local fee market design. Mitigation strategies include increasing priority fees, submitting directly to the leader's TPU, routing through staked RPC nodes (SWQoS), and using Jito bundles.