What Does the Scheduler Do in Agave?

The scheduler is the brain of Solana's Transaction Processing Unit (TPU)

Key Responsibilities:

• Receives transactions - Ingests incoming transactions from the network via TPU
• Prioritizes by fees - Orders transactions based on priority fees (higher fees = higher priority)
• Detects conflicts - Identifies which transactions access the same accounts (read/write locks)
• Schedules execution - Assigns non-conflicting transactions to worker threads for parallel execution
• Maximizes throughput - Balances between batch size and parallelism to optimize block production

Current Schedulers in Agave:

# Central Scheduler (dependency graphs)
--block-production-method central-scheduler

# Greedy Scheduler (no graphs)  
--block-production-method central-scheduler-greedy

Why Adaptive Scheduler?

Problem:

• Fixed schedulers can't adapt - Central scheduler builds dependency graphs (high overhead under load), greedy scheduler skips graphs but creates smaller batches
• No runtime flexibility - Current Agave requires validator restart to switch schedulers via -block-production-method flag
• Different workloads need different strategies - High contention vs low contention scenarios benefit from different approaches

Solution: Adaptive Scheduling