Anza recommends upgrading Solana mainnet validator to Agave 4, with Turbine retransmission delay reduced to about 0.8ms

The Solana development company Anza announced that it has officially recommended the mainnet validators upgrade to Agave 4. This upgrade introduces XDP for Turbine, QUIC-only TPU data access, a faster replay stage, and several SIMD features that will be activated during this cycle.

Anza stated that production environment tests on large mainnet validators showed that XDP has reduced the Turbine retransmission delay from about 600 ms to approximately 0.8 ms, providing critical performance headroom for Solana's push towards 100 million CU blocks. Additionally, Agave 4 has completely removed UDP transaction access, making QUIC the only transaction submission method; PoH entry verification and Ed25519 signature verification have also been removed from the critical path and processed asynchronously to enhance replay stage performance.

This round of upgrades will also gradually enable several SIMD features, including p-token (an SPL Token alternative that can free up about 13% of block capacity), Stake Program v5, SBPFv3 support, pre-funded account creation, and BLS12-381 syscall, among others.