Trade-offs in Indexing Solana at Scale

Short summary

Building a Solana indexer at scale requires five critical architectural trade-offs: monolithic design for operational simplicity over microservices, RPC polling for provider flexibility and reliability over Geyser's real-time streaming, normalized schemas for query flexibility at scale, exponential backoff with fast failure for visibility over infinite retry masking bugs, and sequential RPC fetches with concurrent writes to balance ordering against throughput. Each choice depends on operational maturity and team expertise, not theoretical superiority.

• •Monolithic architectures outperform microservices at indexer scale until reaching 100k+ transactions/second
• •RPC polling with exponential backoff sacrifices 200ms latency for simplicity and provider independence over Geyser plugins
• •Normalized database schemas prove faster than denormalization at 1B+ transaction scale despite higher query complexity

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