Solana Latency in Europe: Solid GetBlock Leadership

GetBlock’s dedicated actions of expanding blockchain infrastructure pays off: recently, our nodes became the fastest in several regions, such as BSC nodes in America. Inspired by this success, we launched a series of studies to analyze RPC node latencies in different regions and identify where GetBlock nodes are the best-performing.

Here, we’ll focus on the Solana node performance in Europe, one of the regions where GetBlock earned a solid leadership.

Definitions: What is latency and why should it be low?

A latency is the time it takes for data to travel from the source to the destination across a network. Lower latency results in faster communication and better performance, especially in real-time applications. It matters for all online applications, including Web3 apps.

The importance of latency has been highlighted many times, long before Web3. In 2006, before Bitcoin was even born, Google reported that half a second delay in search result generation drops traffic by 20%. And it was 20 years ago, when the 5 Mbit Internet connection was considered a lightning-fast luxury! Now, user expectations are much larger.

If you want your services to be profitable, reducing latency is your foremost priority.

Low latency can be reached by several methods, to name a few:

GetBlock, in particular, managed to reduce latency greatly by expanding its computational infrastructure to various regions.

Latency in Web3: Request response speed

What are we measuring here? Here is the algorithm of how RPC requests work and, thus, how their latency can be calculated:

The time between the method call and value response is the RPC node latency. Every second, tens or even hundreds of blockchain requests can be sent by a single user, so the latency is measured in milliseconds.

Milestone: Solana method latency drops to 33 ms at GetBlock

Recently, GetBlock expanded its infrastructure to several regions in Europe and North America, so people around the world can connect to the closest nodes. Physical closeness is one of the crucial factors that reduce latency, and GetBlock’s success proves it.

Below, one can see the average latency on Solana Mainnet network with one of the most widely used methods, getBalance. It shows the current balance of the Solana account, which then can be displayed on the user screen or utilized for further computations.

One can visit CompareNodes and check the latency at any given moment. During our check, the average latency was 84.0 milliseconds, so GetBlock was almost 2.5 times better than average with its 33.5 milliseconds.

What does it mean for GetBlock node users?

Each of our latency improvements is another motivation for Web3 projects to buy our nodes.

GetBlock leadership: What’s next?

With this milestone, GetBlock isn’t planning to stop. Our ultimate goal is to reach lowest latency not with some chains and in some regions, but everywhere. Inspired by our current success, we’re currently working on expanding infrastructure in the Asia region. But not just that.

Our research will continue, and soon we’ll reveal on which regions and networks GetBlock is number one now, too. Meanwhile, our dedicated teams will focus on:

All our studies will be available on the website soon. Be connected!