Solana Validator Latency Scanner

This tool measures network latency to all Solana validators on mainnet-beta using ICMP pings and prints a table of the top validators by stake.
It also saves full results to out.json and computes a stake-weighted latency metric — a practical measure of how well-connected your node is to the validators that matter most.

The stake-weighted latency gives a single number summarizing how “close” your node is, in network terms, to the validators that control the most stake

1. The script queries the Solana mainnet RPC for:

   • The current validator set and their activated stake
     (via solana_cli::process_show_validators)
   • The cluster gossip table for each validator’s IP address
     (via solana_cli::process_show_gossip)

2. It then uses ping_async to send ICMP echo requests (3 per validator) to each validator’s gossip IP.

3. Latency is measured as the average round-trip time (RTT) of those 3 pings.

4. The full data is written to out.json as JSON:

   {
     "validators": {
       "<validator_pubkey>": {
         "stake": 13255586830000000000,
         "ping_ms": { "Success": { "time_ms": 159 } }
       }
     }
   }

5. A formatted table is printed to the console showing:

• Rank by stake
• Validator identity
• IP address
• Stake (in SOL, formatted with commas)
• Average latency (in milliseconds)

6. The script also prints a stake-weighted latency summary — this gives more importance to high-stake validators, which tend to produce more blocks.

Build / run

cargo build --release
cargo run --release

Optional: Display more rows

cargo run --release -- -n 50

Example output

Summary:
  Successful entries: 968/991
  Stake-weighted latency: 302.52 ms

Top 20 validators by stake (change with -n):
| #  | Validator                                    | IP              | Stake (SOL) | Latency (ms) |
|----|----------------------------------------------|-----------------|-------------|--------------|
| 1  | HEL1USMZKAL2odpNBj2oCjffnFGaYwmbGmyewGv1e2TU | 64.130.57.131   | 13,255,586  | 150          |
| 2  | DRpbCBMxVnDK7maPM5tGv6MvB3v1sRMC86PZ8okm21hy | 67.202.63.79    | 11,695,946  | 1003         |
| 3  | JupmVLmA8RoyTUbTMMuTtoPWHEiNQobxgTeGTrPNkzT  | 67.213.121.209  | 11,420,330  | 180          |
| 4  | Fd7btgySsrjuo25CJCj7oE7VPMyezDhnx7pZkj2v69Nk | 67.213.121.169  | 10,647,284  | 199          |
| 5  | DtdSSG8ZJRZVv5Jx7K1MeWp7Zxcu19GD5wQRGRpQ9uMF | 86.54.152.245   | 8,531,286   | 169          |