Access nodes have functionality that allows retrying transactions that are never finalized. This handles the case where a transaction is successfully sent to a collection node, but for whatever reason gets dropped and never ends up in a finalized block.

Implementation

This feature needs some work to cleanup some tech debt. Before we spend the time on it, I wanted to kick off a conversation about whether or not we actually need or want this feature. It's currently not used on the public Access nodes, and does not appear to have ever been.

A couple examples of problematic code that should be fixed:

we will block the consensus follower while serially resending tx to collection nodes.

The logic could be fixed, but it's only worth the time if we think we actually need/want this functionality at all. Under heavy load, if collection nodes start dropping transactions, ANs using this feature would continually resubmit them compounding the problem.

My opinion is we should remove the feature, but curious what other's opinion are.