How is the price per compute unit determined?

[meeh0w]

Hello!

As the title suggests, I'm trying to wrap my head around how the price for a single compute unit is determined?

Is getRecentPrioritizationFees RPC call used?

When I call this RPC method, I'm constantly getting zeroes in the responses and yet the transactions I issue through Phantom wallet get different price per compute unit set. I don't quite understand how that price is determined, as it varies from 0.1 Lamports to 300 Lamports per compute unit between two transactions that are very close in time to each other.

Any answers or hints would be highly appreciated.

Thanks! ❤️

[MobiusRoamer]

Hey the Phantom wallet does this using the following formula
priority fees = compute budget ∗ compute unit price
and
compute budget = # of instructions ∗ compute unit limit
the number of instructions refers to the number of operations to be processed in a tx. You can find out more about it here (https://docs.phantom.com/developer-powertools/solana-priority-fees).
I am guessing there are variations in number of instructions, assuming you are looking at two different txs.
If the txs are indeed similar, it can be due to the solana network experiencing some spiking congestion, hence users are bidding up inclusion. But from what you said it sounds like the two txs are very close to each other. Do you know what time elapsed between the two?
Hope this helps.