Why won't transaction propagate to other nodes?

Question

I've got a transaction where I've already signed bytes and am ready to inject the operation.

If I inject it to my local node, I can see the txn in my nodes' mempool. But if I query another node, say giganode.io, it's not in their mempool, and not in mempool of other nodes I manage. The operation is inside the "applied" section of my mempool, indicating there is nothing wrong (ie: all fees are good, counter good, etc).

Eventually the txn disappears from my node; having never propagated.

I repeat the injection on to giganode. Now, I can see the txn in giganode's mempool, but not in the mempool of any other nodes. Eventually it disappears.

I can repeat this process over and over on any node which accepts injections. The txn appears only in the local node's mempool and never p2p's out to the network.

What would be the cause of this? What is fundamentally wrong with this txn that it won't go out to the network? Here's one such /mempool/pending_operations grab:

{
  "applied": [
    {
      "hash": "ong6pLVyneQnE7GafJs4BLqvo4DjYJpcbPQusgRJ3tp8mnBTF7H",
      "branch": "BLaCmxW59eNLNWqvRMCoNxrxPo91pjwfx16knVdYZybPzbKmGfE",
      "contents": [
        {
          "kind": "transaction",
          "source": "tz1eXXXXX",
          "fee": "1792",
          "counter": "5183887",
          "gas_limit": "15385",
          "storage_limit": "257",
          "amount": "516458",
          "destination": "tz1ZZZZZ"
        }
      ],
      "signature": "sigRoymL59X2JB8WiiabowKSSSSSSS"
    },
...

The op never leaves 'applied'. No error messages ever attached to the op. It just silently disappears after about 30m.

Answer 1

I don't agree that the mempool behavior indicate that the fee is all good. On the contrary. Public nodes like Giganode generally don't reject operations based on fee in the prevalidation, while most other nodes do apply the default filter. The fee is most likely too low. I don't know exactly how many bytes you got there, but increasing the fee with 10 mutez will probably do the trick.