Solana Client Agave Smashes 1.1 Million TPS, Matching Firedancer’s Record

Solana’s Rust validator client Agave has matched Firedancer’s lab record, briefly peaking at 1.1 million transactions per second in a synthetic, single-node ￰0￱ result was disclosed by Solana core engineer Andrew Fitzgerald, who wrote : “Hit a burst of 1.1m TPS on agave this morning. Single-node synthetic test with simple ￰1￱ a branch with several changes not yet merged,” before listing PoH recording and status-cache improvements alongside new “scheduler-bindings,” with block/shred limits disabled for the ￰2￱ on caveats, Fitzgerald added a plain-English qualifier: “disabled block/shred limits, and it’s a burst not ￰3￱ 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.

Solana’s Core Client Smashes 1.1M TPS The milestone immediately fed a broader narrative about client-level competition on ￰4￱ co-founder Mert Mumtaz framed it this way: “last year Firedancer hit 1.1M TPS on a synthetic test — now, Agave has done the ￰5￱ is an outdated notion that Solana will become faster only if ￰6￱ is from a time when Agave wasn’t as competitive — but it is ￰7￱ competition between the two client teams will improve the chain like never before.” Anatoly Yakovenko, Solana’s co-founder, poked fun at the victory lap, quipping: “Pls no ￰8￱ ship ag and lower the timers to 150ms.” The remark tracks with the network’s ongoing push to reduce consensus ￰9￱ push is currently crystallized in SIMD-0326 (“Alpenglow”) , a consensus overhaul now in community voting that targets ~150 ms block finality by reworking how and where validator votes ￰10￱ 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 ￰11￱ 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 ￰12￱ obvious question is what the 1.1M TPS burst actually means for ￰13￱ 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 ￰14￱ 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 ￰15￱ broader takeaways stand out. First, Solana’s client diversity is no longer hypothetical: Agave (Anza) and Firedancer ( Jump Crypto ) are now trading blows on the same synthetic leaderboard, with different codebases stressing different parts of the system — a healthy sign for resilience and future performance. Second, the product focus has shifted from trophy numbers to latency and predictability: the 150 ms target, if adopted, compresses user-perceived finality in ways that matter for payments, trading, and real-time apps even when headline TPS ￰16￱ press time, SOL traded at $207.86.