Profiling Solana Programs

The goal of this project is to profile Solana programs and gain a better understanding of how to optimize Anchor programs. While this is not a comprehensive analysis, it does give us a good starting point for optimizing Anchor programs.

The Pinocchio program is not a 1:1 comparison, but it demonstrates account creation with minimal overhead while maintaining essential security checks. While not necessarily optimal, it serves as a baseline for low-level performance.

We used the SBPF profiler to create flamegraphs of each program. You can reproduce these results on your own machine by following these steps:

Prerequisites:

• Solana CLI version ≥ 2.3.0

# Anchor Program
cd anchor
cargo build-sbf
SBPF_PROFILE=/FULL-PATH/profile/target/sbpf-solana-solana/release/profile.so \
  cargo test -p profile -- --nocapture

# Pinocchio Program
cd ../pinocchio
cargo build-sbf
SBPF_PROFILE=/FULL-PATH/target/sbpf-solana-solana/release/pinocchio_create_account.so \
  cargo test -p pinocchio-create-account -- --nocapture

# Native Program
cd ../native
cargo build-sbf
SBPF_PROFILE=/FULL-PATH/target/sbf-solana-solana/release/create_account_native.so \
  cargo test -p create_account_native -- --nocapture

The flamegraphs will be saved in each program's target/sbpf-solana-solana/release directory.

Performance Comparison

Program Type	Compute Units	% vs Native	% vs Pinocchio
Pinocchio	1,526	-48.4%	-
Native	2,959	-	+93.9%
Anchor	4,503	+52.2%	+195.2%

Flamegraph Analysis

Anchor Flamegraph

The Anchor program flamegraph reveals significant overhead. There is substantial time spent in entrypoint::deserialize and serialization before executing the CPI. The entrypoint::deserialize alone consumes 28% of the total compute—nearly 3x the compute of the entire Pinocchio program.

Native Flamegraph

The native program flamegraph is much simpler. While it shares a similar structure to the Anchor program, the compute usage is significantly lower. The entrypoint::deserialize still consumes a notable portion of compute, but there is less overhead from account processing and fewer unnecessary validation checks.

Pinocchio Flamegraph

The Pinocchio flamegraph is strikingly minimal compared to Anchor and Native flamegraphs. Pinocchio provides just the essential entrypoint functionality with minimal overhead instead of a full framework.

Conclusion

Anchor remains an excellent choice for building Solana programs, offering a fully-featured framework with built-in security guarantees and developer-friendly abstractions. However, this analysis reveals a significant performance trade-off:

• Anchor: Best developer experience, highest overhead (4,503 CU)
• Native: Solana-program entrypoint (2,959 CU)
• Pinocchio: Maximum performance, minimal abstractions, new entrypoint (1,526 CU)