Alibaba Explores Solana Network Capabilities With High-Performance RPC Showcase

• Alibaba Cloud has launched new infrastructure that speeds up Solana RPC nodes, slashing latency for high-frequency traders.
• The setup uses clustered ECS placement, 9th-gen hosts, ERI, and high-IOPS disks to support low-hop RPC access.

Alibaba Cloud has launched its latest infrastructure strategies for supporting Solana RPC nodes, focusing on reducing latency for high-frequency trading and blockchain interaction. The configuration employs Alibaba Cloud’s Elastic Compute Service (ECS) in a Cluster Placement Group that enables all the nodes to operate in a low-latency zone to enhance transactions.

The company claims that 9th-generation dedicated host instances are 20% and 30% faster than the former 8th-gen and 7th-gen instances, respectively. Those are in favour of Intel GNR CPUs, Elastic RDMA Interface (ERI), and Intel security services such as TDX, SGX, and TME. They also feature CIPU 2.0, which offers 200G dual-channel bandwidth to support faster data throughput.

Alibaba Cloud balances this with elastic ephemeral disks, which have up to 1 million IOPS and 4 GB/s/disk. These disks can achieve local drive read-write speeds and can be scaled on many instances, with the flexibility to scale Solana node infrastructure. This action follows the introduction of the Solana Foundation’s Trade on Solana program, which is designed to meet the needs of professional trading companies interested in gaining access to the market, data, and operational services.

Solana RPC Node Setup

Performance tests were conducted on bare metal servers in the Singapore region. Results showed the getSlot RPC call had its latency reduced from 25 milliseconds to 10 milliseconds when using Alibaba Cloud with ZAN. 

For the getBlock call, with a data size of 4MB, the latency dropped from 245 milliseconds to 195 milliseconds. This enhancement is essential to developers and trading companies that require regular and fast access to blockchain data.

The RPC nodes are accessible through Alibaba’s backbone network and will allow users to circumvent the congestion of the public internet. This provides a more stable and low-latency connection between clients and the Solana cluster. 

A company spokesperson said, “We can provide RPC nodes directly. We already have experience hosting them. With Zestem, a partner of Alibaba Cloud, we’ve shown how this can work in production.”

The setup also helps minimize hops between users and nodes. Developers are advised to select full nodes with the highest block height from a pool of more than 100 active nodes. According to data shared, 80% of Solana transactions are confirmed in under two slots, or approximately 800 milliseconds, while the network maintains a 99.9% on-chain success rate.

The RPC showcase arrives as more institutions and platforms watch Solana’s trading stack. As previously reported, SushiSwap has expanded to Solana, adding SOL token swaps and cross-chain trading in its interface. Amid this update, SOL has fallen over 4.5% to trade at $80.52 at press time.