Pressed on caveats, Fitzgerald added a plain-English qualifier: “disabled block/shred limits, and it’s a burst not sustained. have several long-term perf improvements squashed on top of scheduler-bindings to make this happen.” The exchange underscored that this is a laboratory datapoint, not a network-wide throughput number.
Under the hood, the Agave test hints at where performance headroom is being unlocked. “Scheduler-bindings” — a forthcoming extension that lets validators plug in custom block-packing logic without forking core — has been on Anza’s public roadmap since May. Recent Agave 2.3 literature also details a revamped TPU client (“tpu-client-next”), AccountsDB I/O reductions, a greedy scheduler, and snapshot/gossip improvements, all of which cut real-world overhead even if they don’t show up in synthetic peaks one-for-one.
The obvious question is what the 1.1M TPS burst actually means for users. Synthetic single-node tests measure raw execution and scheduling throughput with some guardrails temporarily lifted; they do not translate linearly to mainnet capacity, which is bounded by network propagation, signature verification, scheduler policy, and economic constraints. Still, the number is directionally consistent with the network’s trajectory. Earlier this month, independent experiments observed six-figure TPS bursts on mainnet under heavy program-call load — a separate datapoint that, taken together with Agave’s lab figure, reinforces the pace of optimization across both client and protocol layers.
At press time, SOL traded at $207.86.
