Solana Proposes Changes to Computing Budget to Improve Block Efficiency

Anza engineer Tao Zhu has proposed a core change to the Solana protocol to improve block packing efficiency. The proposal, presented in Solana improvement document SIMD-0172, aims to address the wasted block space caused by the computational budgeting process.

Currently, Solana's computational budgeting process uses 200,000 Computation Units (CUs) per transaction by default, but Zhu believes that this value is often overestimated, leading to wasted block space. z Zhu proposes to reduce the default budget to zero within 10 epochs, requiring transaction creators to request a more accurate computational budget.

This change would allow each Solana block to contain more transactions, thereby increasing fee revenue for validators. However, some developers felt that the proposal was not radical enough, suggesting that the calculated budget be moved to the transaction header to reduce the data footprint.

While Zhu has indicated that the calculated budget process may be eliminated entirely in the future, the current proposal still raises concerns among some developers that the temporary fix will increase the burden on developers.