Confirming transaction seems to be inconsistent?

Question

I have been using the following chunk of code for awhile and it seems to work about 98% of the time, however there are cases where the transaction does go through seemingly immediately, but this does not pick it up in time, even when I have my confirmTransactionInitialTimeout set to 60 seconds. Is there a better alternative or something that I'm doing wrong? Thanks! (I am using the $50 plan on quicknode as an RPC)

const connection = new Connection(
        process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_CONNECTION_NETWORK == "devnet"
      ? process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_SOLANA_RPC_HOST_DEVNET
      : process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_SOLANA_RPC_HOST_MAINNET_BETA,
        { commitment: "processed", confirmTransactionInitialTimeout: 60000 },
);

await connection.confirmTransaction({
    signature: signature,
    blockhash: blockhash.blockhash,
    lastValidBlockHeight: blockhash.lastValidBlockHeight,
})

Answer 1

I'm not 100% sure that I've fixed it, but after some research, it seems that it's possible for the transaction to be confirmed before it hits my confirm function, causing it to time out because it's already been confirmed. I think I solved this by adding this function before my confirm transaction. If it's already been confirmed, it doesn't need to run confirmTransaction, otherwise it does this:

connection.getSignatureStatus(signature)

Answer 2

So, in Solana chain, this is expected when some transactions get dropped for some reason. You can find more information here: https://www.quicknode.com/guides/solana-development/solana-transaction-propagation-handling-dropped-transactions

There is no silver bullet to force all the transactions to be accepted by chain. But you can find some good code samples in the article on how to handle Transaction propagation better.