Optimizing Solana Transaction Throughput with Rust SDK and Anchor for Asynchronous Smart Contracts

Introduction

The importance of transaction throughput in blockchain systems

In any blockchain network, transaction throughput - how many transactions can be processed per second (TPS)-plays a vital role. It directly affects how responsive and scalable applications can be. When demand spikes, a network with low throughput can become congested, resulting in slow confirmations and high fees. That’s not something users are willing to tolerate, especially in real-world applications like DeFi, payments, or on-chain games.

As the ecosystem grows more complex, and dApps start handling thousands of users and interactions, high throughput becomes not just a technical goal, but a core requirement for adoption.

Why performance optimization matters on Solana

Solana was built with performance in mind. Thanks to innovations like Proof of History and Sealevel’s parallel execution engine, it’s already one of the fastest blockchains in the world. But here’s the catch: just because the chain is fast doesn’t mean every smart contract will be fast by default.

If developers write programs without thinking about how accounts are structured, or if they rely heavily on cross-program invocations, they might unintentionally serialize execution and limit Solana’s full potential. Optimizing how you design and write smart contracts makes a big difference, especially if you’re aiming for production-level performance.

Overview of Rust SDK and Anchor’s role in Solana development

At the core of Solana smart contract development is Rust, a systems programming language known for its speed and memory safety. While the native Solana Rust SDK gives you a lot of power, it also means you’re dealing with a fair bit of boilerplate and complexity.

That’s where Anchor comes in. Anchor is a framework that sits on top of the Rust SDK and simplifies everything. It helps structure your programs, validate accounts, handle serialization, and gives you macros that make your life a lot easier. Using Anchor doesn’t mean giving up control - it means writing cleaner, safer, and more maintainable code, faster.

Together, the Rust SDK and Anchor give developers the tools they need to build scalable, high-performance smart contracts on Solana - and to do it without reinventing the wheel every time.

Understanding Solana’s Transaction Model

How Solana handles transactions

Solana’s architecture is different from most blockchains. At the heart of it is Proof of History (PoH) - a kind of cryptographic clock that lets validators agree on the order of events without having to constantly talk to each other. That drastically reduces the overhead and helps the network reach consensus faster.

But speed isn’t just about consensus. Solana also uses a parallel execution engine called Sealevel. Unlike Ethereum, where smart contracts execute one after another, Solana can run many instructions at the same time - as long as they don’t touch the same accounts. This is one of Solana’s biggest strengths, but it also means developers need to think differently when designing programs.

What determines performance

Even though Solana is capable of handling thousands of transactions per second, smart contract performance still depends on a few critical factors:

• Account access - If multiple transactions try to read or write to the same account, they’ll be executed one by one. That creates a bottleneck.

• CPI calls - Cross-program invocations are powerful, but they come with overhead. If used too often or inefficiently, they can slow things down.

• Compute budget - Each transaction has a limit on how much computation it can do. Exceeding that limit causes the transaction to fail.

• Serialization - If your design forces transactions to happen in a specific order, you’re likely sacrificing a lot of potential parallelism.

The developer’s role in throughput

Here’s the key point: Solana doesn’t magically optimize your program for you. It gives you the tools, but how well you use them is up to you. Writing performant smart contracts means structuring data and logic in a way that plays nicely with the network’s parallel nature. That often means separating state, avoiding unnecessary dependencies between accounts, and thinking carefully about execution flow.

If you treat Solana like Ethereum and just port over the same smart contract logic, you’ll likely run into issues. But if you design with Solana’s strengths in mind, you can build applications that scale smoothly and feel fast for users, even under heavy load.

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Why Rust SDK and Anchor?

Why Solana uses Rust

Solana smart contracts - or programs, as they’re called here - are written in Rust. That’s not just a coincidence. Rust is fast, safe, and gives fine-grained control over memory without a garbage collector, which is exactly what you want in a performance-critical environment like a blockchain.

But Rust is also a low-level language, and working directly with the Solana Rust SDK means you’re dealing with a lot of boilerplate. You’ll need to manually handle things like account validation, instruction decoding, and serialization. It gives you flexibility, sure, but it also adds complexity and room for error.

What Anchor brings to the table

Anchor is a framework built on top of the Rust SDK that takes care of most of the repetitive stuff for you. It simplifies how you write programs in several key ways:

• It removes boilerplate and repetitive patterns

• Let's you define account structures and constraints declaratively

• Automatically handles serialization and deserialization

• Validates incoming accounts and instructions under the hood

In short, you write less code, ship faster, and avoid a bunch of common mistakes.

It also comes with great tooling: a CLI for managing builds and deployments, test support, and handy templates to bootstrap your project. That’s especially helpful when you’re building a real product, not just experimenting.

Rust SDK vs Anchor - which one should you use?

If you need total control over every byte and want to squeeze out every last drop of performance, the Rust SDK gives you that. It’s a solid choice for system-level programs or libraries with complex logic.

If your goal is to build quickly, keep the codebase clean, and make onboarding easy for teammates, Anchor is likely the better pick.

The good news is that both tools are powerful and production-ready. One just gives you more raw control, while the other helps you move faster without sacrificing quality.

Asynchronous Smart Contracts: The Next Step

What do asynchronous smart contracts mean

When we say “asynchronous” in Solana development, we’re not talking about async/await syntax like in regular Rust. What we mean is designing contracts in a way that allows logic to be broken into smaller, independent steps that don’t block each other. Each action becomes part of a broader flow, but it doesn’t rely on everything happening at once inside a single transaction.

In other words, you’re not squeezing all logic into one atomic call. Instead, you let different users or parts of the system interact with the contract over time, and that’s where the real performance boost comes from.

Why this matter for throughput

Solana’s architecture shines when transactions can run in parallel. But that only happens when those transactions touch different accounts. If your program constantly updates the same shared state, like a global counter or vault, you force Solana to execute one at a time. That’s where things slow down.

By thinking asynchronously, you avoid those collisions. For example:

• Let each user interact with their own PDA account instead of writing to a shared one

• Break logic into separate stages that can be triggered independently

• Store intermediate results on-chain so that later steps can pick up where the last one left off

This opens the door to true parallelism, which is what Solana was built for.

Trade-offs and challenges

Going async isn’t magic, though. It requires more thoughtful planning. You’ll need to manage state carefully so it stays consistent, especially when multiple users interact with your contract at the same time. There’s also the question of what happens if one step succeeds but the next fails - how do you recover?

And let’s not forget race conditions. If two users trigger related actions at the same time, things can get tricky unless your design handles that gracefully.

But once you get comfortable with this model, it becomes a superpower. You’ll start to build contracts that are faster, more scalable, and better suited for real-world traffic.
Best Practices for Optimizing Throughput

Think in parallel

The biggest mistake developers make on Solana is treating it like Ethereum. On Ethereum, execution is always one-by-one, so the default mindset is to centralize state and do everything in one go. On Solana, the opposite is true. If you want performance, your code has to embrace parallelism.

So before you write a single line, ask yourself: can this logic be broken down? Can each user have their isolated account? Can I avoid shared state?

Use Program Derived Addresses (PDAs) to separate user data

PDAs are essential for throughput. Instead of storing everything in one global account, you can create unique accounts per user, per round, or even per action. That way, multiple transactions can hit your program at the same time without stepping on each other’s toes.

For example, if you’re building a staking contract, don’t keep all stakes in one account. Let each user have their staking account, and use a PDA to derive it.

Avoid overusing CPIs

Cross-Program Invocations (CPIs) let your program call other programs. That’s powerful, but it comes at a cost. Each CPI eats into your compute budget and adds overhead. If your contract chains too many CPIs together, you’ll hit compute limits fast.

Only use CPIs when necessary. If the logic can be handled internally, keep it simple.

Pre-initialize accounts where possible

Creating accounts on-the-fly during user interaction is convenient, but also expensive. If you can, initialize accounts ahead of time - during onboarding, for example. This reduces runtime costs and speeds up user-facing interactions.

Bonus: pre-initialized accounts also help you avoid rent issues and make your programs more predictable.

Avoid account collisions

Always remember: if two transactions touch the same writable account, they can’t run in parallel. That’s a bottleneck.

Use read-only accounts whenever possible. Split up your logic. Minimize dependencies. The fewer overlapping accounts you have, the more transactions Solana can process at once.

Keep an eye on compute units

Every instruction has a computational cost. If your transaction goes over the limit, it fails. Use Solana’s compute_budget tools to allocate more units when needed, and always profile your code to see where time is being spent.

Small optimizations can go a long way, especially at scale.

Test in real conditions

Don’t just test locally. Simulate high load. See what happens when 1,000 users interact with your contract at the same time. That’s when design flaws show up.

Use devnet and localnet for stress testing, and watch for blocked transactions, latency spikes, and failed calls.

Benchmarks and Some Examples

Why benchmarks matter

It’s one thing to talk about performance in theory, and another to see how your code behaves under pressure. That’s where benchmarks come in. Without them, you’re guessing. With them, you can track how every change impacts speed, compute usage, and user experience.

And on Solana, small improvements can lead to big wins. Saving a few compute units or avoiding one account collision might double your effective throughput when traffic spikes.

Key metrics to focus on

When testing throughput on Solana, these are the numbers that matter most:

• Transactions per second (TPS) - how many transactions your program can handle in parallel

• Compute units per instruction - how expensive your logic is to run

• Latency - how long it takes from sending a transaction to confirmation

• Account conflicts - how often transactions fail to execute in parallel due to shared account access

Tracking these consistently during development helps catch performance regressions early and guide architectural decisions.

Sample case: async staking dApp

Let’s take a simple example - a staking application. First version: one global account stores all stakes. Every user interaction reads and writes to the same state. Looks clean. But in practice, it bottlenecks fast. Two users trying to stake at the same time will block each other.

Second version: Every user gets their staking account via a PDA. Now, users can stake, unstake, and claim rewards without affecting each other. Result? Transaction success rate under load goes up, latency goes down, and TPS improves significantly.

When we benchmarked the two versions under simulated load:

• The first version started hitting account locks after just 30 concurrent users

• The second version scaled cleanly to over 1,000 concurrent interactions with no collisions

Even better, the optimized version used fewer compute units per transaction because it didn’t need to process or validate shared state logic.

Lesson learned

Don’t wait for problems to appear in production. Run benchmarks early. Simulate real-world conditions. And iterate on your design with performance in mind from day one.

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Tools and Debugging Techniques

Use Solana CLI for the basics

The Solana CLI is your go-to tool for working with the network. You can send transactions, check logs, inspect accounts, simulate execution, and benchmark performance. It's fast, reliable, and gives you direct feedback from the chain.

Useful commands include:

• solana logs - to see real-time program output

• solana transaction simulate - to preview how a transaction will behave before sending

• solana account <address> - to inspect account data and ownership

This should be part of your everyday workflow.

Anchor CLI makes development smoother

If you're using Anchor, its CLI wraps a lot of heavy lifting. You can:

• Build and deploy programs with anchor build and anchor deploy

• Run tests with anchor test using built-in localnet simulation

• Use anchor keys to manage key pairs and IDL files

• Run anchor run to execute scripts like seeding accounts or setting up a test state

Anchor also generates an IDL (interface description) for your program, which is super handy for frontends and client libraries.

Debugging with localnet

Anchor and Solana both support localnet environments where you can test everything without touching devnet or mainnet. This is perfect for writing fast feedback loops, simulating stress, or testing complex interactions between multiple accounts.

Run anchor localnet to spin up a validator locally. You can then test with near-zero latency and full control over the blockchain state.

Measure compute usage

Sometimes your transaction fails, and you're not sure why. Often, it's because you ran out of compute units. Solana CLI and Anchor can both help here:

• Add --compute-unit-price to simulate how close you are to the limit

• Use solana transaction simulate to inspect compute usage per instruction

• In Anchor tests, you can log compute units step-by-step using custom macros

If something feels slow, this is where to start looking.

Check for account conflicts

One of the most common performance killers on Solana is account contention. If two users are writing to the same account, one of those transactions is going to get dropped or retried.

To debug this:

• Simulate concurrent transactions locally or on devnet

• Check logs for Transaction was not processed in time or Account already in use errors

• Use PDAs and read-only flags wisely to avoid unnecessary write locks

Final tip: test under load

A contract that works fine with one user might break with 100. Write load tests. Script 50-100 concurrent users and watch how the system handles it. That's where real-world bugs and bottlenecks show up.

Looking Ahead

Solana keeps moving forward

Even though Solana already handles a huge number of transactions per second, the protocol is still actively evolving. The team is constantly shipping updates to improve scalability, reduce costs, and make life easier for developers.

One of the most promising areas is state compression. Right now, storing a lot of data on-chain can get expensive, especially for things like NFT collections or on-chain metadata. Compression can help cut those costs dramatically, which opens the door for new use cases that were too heavy before.

Better async patterns and parallelism

Solana is built around parallel execution, but writing async-style logic still takes a bit of work. Developers currently rely on PDAs and manual state splitting to make things async-friendly. That works, but it can be tricky.

In the future, we can expect better native support for async behavior, including more predictable transaction scheduling, safer retries, and improved tooling around parallel program flows. That will make it easier to build things like order books, on-chain games, or workflows with multiple steps.

Anchor is getting better, too

Anchor is already the go-to framework for writing Solana programs, but it’s still improving. Recent updates brought cleaner error handling, better developer experience, and support for newer Solana features like programmable stake and compressed data.

There’s also a shift happening toward modular smart contract design - splitting logic across multiple small programs instead of building one giant one. Anchor is starting to support that model more smoothly, which helps with upgrades, audits, and scaling your project over time.

Tooling and developer experience are catching up

The Solana dev ecosystem is filling out fast. We’re seeing better local validators, lighter testing tools, improved TypeScript SDKs, and new monitoring platforms. That makes it easier not just to build, but to debug and ship production-ready programs faster.

More importantly, the mindset is shifting. It’s no longer just “can we do this?” but “how efficiently and cleanly can we pull this off?”

If you’re building now, you’re early

The good news is that if you’re already developing on Solana, you’re ahead of the curve. But it’s smart to future-proof your contracts as much as possible. Keep things modular, avoid hard dependencies, and think about how your logic might need to scale.

Solana and Anchor are only getting better from here. Building with flexibility in mind now will save you a lot of pain later.

Conclusion

Optimizing transaction throughput on Solana isn't just a technical tweak - it's a key part of building apps that work at scale. When you design your contracts with parallelism in mind, avoid unnecessary account collisions, and use tools like Rust SDK and Anchor effectively, you're setting your project up for real-world performance.

Solana gives you the tools, but it’s up to the developer to use them right. That means thinking differently - breaking logic into smaller steps, separating user data with PDAs, and keeping compute usage lean.

We’ve been deep in the Solana and Rust ecosystem for years. Our team has helped launch high-load dApps, optimized contracts for speed and cost, and worked through edge cases that only show up when real users start pushing limits.

If you're building something ambitious on Solana - or just want to make sure your app is ready for production - let’s talk. Fill out our contact form, and we’ll be happy to explore how we can help. Whether it’s architecture, development, or scaling, we’re ready to jump in.