blockchain//Besu//race condition

A race condition in a Besu network is a non-deterministic startup: launching nodes in rapid succession without pauses can leave some of them isolated.

A race condition in a Besu network is a non-deterministic startup: launching nodes in rapid succession without pauses can leave some of them isolated.

The root cause is that the bootnode's P2P module may not be fully initialized when later nodes try to connect, and P2P then enters flaky retry loops. The symptoms are inconsistent across runs: some nodes connect and others report 0 peers. A sleep does not fix it, because it is a state problem: the bootnode may accept connections intermittently whatever the wait. Its most common trigger is a bootnode that lists its own enode in --bootnodes (self-reference).