WaitForTransaction() incorrectly times out (the transaction was immediately mined)

Describe the bug A transaction was submitted and quickly mined on the network; however, waitForTransaction did not return and in fact ended up failing as if the transaction was not mined/confirmed.

• Transaction submitted: [2021-04-14 13:04:25.209 +0000] INFO (IndexerAgent/1 on indexer-agent-0): Transaction pending
• It is mined at Apr-14-2021 01:04:35 PM +UTC (https://rinkeby.etherscan.io/tx/0xf15ee7523d3943bf1e0880c0e0ff388ed715fe7b0162fe80de9acda88b29581b)
• waitForTransaction timed out thinking that the tx did not get 3 confirmations [2021-04-14 13:14:24.424 +0000] WARN (IndexerAgent/1 on indexer-agent-0): Failed to send transaction, retrying

Here is the place where waitForTransaction is used in our application: https://github.com/graphprotocol/indexer/blob/552061320c50635094af3b1fdc12d2d981a0e6a1/packages/indexer-agent/src/network.ts#L182-L185

Environment:

• The issue was noticed on a Node application running on a GCloud cluster VM (Ubuntu) talking to an Alchemy API Rinkeby endpoint.
• Ethers v5.1.0
• Using a StaticJsonRpcProvider

Search Terms waitForTransaction(), transaction incorrectly timed out

[ricmoo]

I’ve been trying to reproduce this but cannot.

Do you possibly have a long running CPU intensive test that does not yield to the event loop? Are you using your own API key?

Can you try out this script, and see if you see the same problem? I’m wondering if it is a link/firewall issue:

const { ethers } = require("ethers");

let lastNow = null;
function getTime() {
    const now = (new Date()).getTime();
    if (lastNow == null) { lastNow = now; }
    const result = parseInt(String(now - lastNow)) / 1000;
    lastNow = now;
    return result;
}

(async function() {
  const provider = new ethers.providers.AlchemyProvider("ropsten");

  while (1) {
    // reset the timer
    getTime();

    // Get the current block
    const blockNumber = await provider.getBlockNumber();
    console.log(`Block Number (${ getTime() }):`, blockNumber);

    // Get a transaction to test
    const txs = (await provider.getBlockWithTransactions(blockNumber)).transactions;
    if (txs.length === 0) { continue; }
    const tx = txs[0];
    console.log(`Transaction (${ getTime() }):`, tx.hash);

    //console.log(`Receipt before wait (${ getTime() }):`, await provider.getTransactionReceipt(tx.hash));

    // Wait for the receipt
    try {
        const receipt = await provider.waitForTransaction(tx.hash, 3, 0);
        console.log(`Receipt after wait (${ getTime() }):`, receipt.confirmations);
    } catch (error) {
        console.log(`Receipt after wait error (${ getTime() }):`, error);
    }

    console.log("=========================");
  }
})();

Also, it shouldn’t matter, but can you also remove your node_modules/, package-lock.json (and yarn lock file if you use yarn) and do a new npm install to get the latest versions?

I’ve also tried setting the number of confirmations to a very large number and the timeout to smaller values, and the timeout seems to be honoured.

If you can tweak this script to reproduce the problem too, that might help me figure out the issue.

Thanks! 😃

[ricmoo]

@peterbraden What do you mean? It registers a callback using .on, so it will be called on every block after the transaction is mined. It is not using .once.