Solana core devs recommend Agave 4.0 upgrade for mainnet validators

Anza, a core development team for Solana, recommended on May 18 via its official X account that mainnet validators upgrade to Agave 4.0. The upgrade includes XDP for Turbine, QUIC-based TPU data access, replay stage optimization, and SIMD features. Anza explained that tests with large mainnet validators showed Turbine retransmission latency dropped from approximately 600ms to around 0.8ms after implementing XDP. The company stated this provides Solana with the performance headroom to scale to one billion Compute Units (CU) per block. Additionally, Agave 4.0 removes UDP-based transaction access, making QUIC the sole method for transaction submission. The team added that replay performance has been improved by making Proof of History (PoH) verification and Ed25519 signature verification asynchronous. Other SIMD features, such as p-token, Stake Program v5, SBPFv3, prefunded account creation, and the BLS12-381 syscall, are scheduled to be activated in phases.