Occasional sharp drop in txs per block recently, causing massive pending txs and gasPrice spikes #2718
Description
Hi everyone, over the past two days we’ve noticed a strange behavior on Polygon and would like to report it here, and also check if others are seeing the same thing or if this is a known issue:
Under normal conditions, each block usually includes 100+ transactions.
However, during certain periods in the last two days, some validators only include a few dozen transactions per block (significantly lower than usual).
Because the actual number of transactions included per block drops sharply, a large number of transactions stay pending for a long time and can’t be confirmed in a timely manner.
During these “abnormal” periods, gasPrice rises noticeably, and users end up bidding higher just to get included.
This situation typically lasts for about 1 hour, after which things return to normal (blocks go back to 100+ txs and gasPrice comes down again).
A few questions:
Is this a known performance/consensus-related issue on the network, or is it caused by the behavior of specific validators?
Is there any monitoring data, incident report, or announcement that we can refer to in order to understand what’s happening during these time windows?
Are there any ongoing fixes or optimizations planned for this kind of “sudden drop in block tx count + gasPrice spike” situation?
If needed, I can provide more detailed information such as specific timestamps, tx hashes, or node logs to help with the investigation. Thanks in advance to all the devs and validators for your help!
