SIMD-0339: Increase CPI Account Info Limit

proposals/0339-increase-cpi-account-info-limit.md

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+---
+simd: '0339'
+title: Increase CPI Account Infos Limit
+authors:
+  - Justin Starry (Anza)
+category: Standard
+type: Core
+status: Review
+created: 2025-08-15
+feature: (fill in with feature key and github tracking issues once accepted)
+---
+
+## Summary
+
+Increase the maximum number of account info's for cross-program invoked (CPI)
+instructions from 64 to 255 and consume compute units for serialized account
+info's and instruction account meta's.
+
+## Motivation
+
+CPI's are restricted to a limit of 64 account info's passed to the syscall.
+This limit is burdensome for onchain programs which themselves were invoked with
+more than 64 accounts because it means they cannot simply pass through the same
+list of account info's that they were invoked with to another CPI syscall. They
+are faced with the burden of first deduplicating the account info's and
+constructing a new list before making the syscall.
+
+This problem arises when onchain programs wrap another program (such as Jupiter)
+that composes many other programs and are invoked with over 64 accounts
+(including duplicates).
+
+Along with the increasing the account info limit, start charging for both
+serialized account info's and instruction account meta's to avoid abuse of
+resources in CPI calls.
+
+## New Terminology
+
+- **Account Info:** The serialized information for each account referenced in a
+CPI instruction used to read account info from the caller program.
+
+## Detailed Design
+
+### Maximum Account Info Length
+
+Increase the maximum account info length imposed on CPI syscalls from **64** to
+**255**. The maximum is inclusive, meaning that a list of account info's with a
+length of 255 is valid.
+
+### Account Info Cost
+
+Consume **1 compute unit (CU)** for every `cpi_bytes_per_unit` (currently 250)
+bytes of account info.
+
+Fixed size of **80 bytes** for each `account_info` broken down as
+
+  - 32 bytes for account address
+  - 32 bytes for owner address
+  - 8 bytes for lamport balance
+  - 8 bytes for data length
+
+The total cost of account info's can be computed with
+`(account_info_size * account_infos_len) / cpi_bytes_per_unit` rounded down to
+the nearest CU.
+
+Note that the SVM can skip duplicate or unused account info's but for simpler CU
+accounting, each account info has the same effect on cost regardless of whether
+it's actually used by the invoked instruction.
+
+### Instruction Account Metadata Cost
+
+Consume **1 compute unit (CU)** for every `cpi_bytes_per_unit` (currently 250)
+bytes of instruction account metadata.
+
+Fixed size of **34 bytes** for each `ix_account_metadata` broken down as
+
+  - 32 bytes for account address
+  - 1 byte for signer flag
+  - 1 byte for writable flag
+
+The total cost of instruction account metadata can be computed with
+`(ix_account_metadata_size * ix.accounts.len()) / cpi_bytes_per_unit` rounded
+down to the nearest CU.
+
+### Reduce base CPI cost
+
+The base cost of CPI syscalls is currently set to 1000 compute units. In order
+to avoid charging more CU's for existing onchain program behavior after the
+activation of this feature, the base cost of CPI syscalls will decreased by 54
+compute units to 946 compute units to offset the new costs.
+
+Before this SIMD, up to 255 instruction account metadata's could be passed to a
+CPI syscall. The base cost offset is therefore `255 * 34 / 250 = 34` CU's.
+
+Before this SIMD, up to 64 account info's could be passed to a CPI syscall.
+The base cost offset is therefore `64 * 80 / 250 = 20` CU's.
+
+## Alternatives Considered
+
+What alternative designs were considered and what pros/cons does this feature
+have relative to them?
+
+## Impact
+
+Since the list of account info's passed to a CPI can now be ~4 times longer,
+there will be more overhead in the SVM to map each instruction account address
+to one of the account info's.
+
+The number of allowed unique account info's remains unchanged so the maximum
+amount of accounts that need to be translated for a CPI syscall has not
+increased.
+
+CPI's will consume compute units proportional to the number of account info's
+and instruction accounts. This gives an extra incentive to onchain programs
+to decrease the number of accounts passed to CPI's.
+
+## Security Considerations
+
+NA
+
+## Drawbacks *(Optional)*
+
+Why should we not do this?
+
+## Backwards Compatibility *(Optional)*
+
+The max account info length increase for CPI's and new costs will be feature
+gated. Since the limit is being increased, existing behavior will not be
+restricted.