Missing Blocks for Months now - No endorsements present in mempool

Question

Mar 23 16:09:30 - client.baking: New baking slot found (level 364815, priority 0) at 2019-03-23T16:08:55Z for ledger_tezos after BL7nWhEJBw93.
Mar 23 16:09:30 - client.baking: No endorsements present in the mempool. Waiting until 2019-03-23T16:09:32Z (2s) for new operations.
Mar 23 16:09:37 - client.baking: Injected block BMUg7cMhnebt for ledger_tezos after BL7nWhEJBw93 (level 364815, priority 0, fitness 00::0000000000acbf94, operations 0+0+0+2).

It looks to be a "no endorsements present in mempool" issue. My node binary is up to date. I have successfully voted on exploration phase. I have my peers set up and my connection is great. I have not missed an endorsement. But block baking has continuously been a problem. This is 100% not due to luck since I had missed 80% of my block bakes. I don't believe it's a connection issue since I have great internet.

Command I use to start the node:

screen -S tezosNode ./tezos-node run --rpc-addr 127.0.0.1:8732

Command I use to start baker:

screen -S baker ./tezos-baker-003-PsddFKi3 run with local node /home/tezos/.tezos-node ledger_tezos

Answer 1

This is a known problem. As discussed on gitlab, it seems to be two problems disguised as one. The first problem is poor connectivity leading to the baker waiting and missing blocks. The second problem is that the baker may have a bug where even though there are endorsements in the node it thinks that there aren't any and waits.

Restarting the baking process doesn't appear to fix it. But restarting the node process does.

This issue can be tracked on gitlab at gitlab.com/tezos/tezos/issues/498