2 hours latency from bitcoin faucet ??

[foof]

Hello all, I am new to bitcoin

I am running the 0.3.19 app for linux
I went to bitcoin faucet 3 hours ago begging for money :-)
The site said money was on my way, to my address 1128MMuCrYeyM3t1ZBvk6Uuy4Fmm5rriSX
I gazed bitcoin for a while and there was no mention of the transaction.
After 15min I thought I had done something wrong like copying the address wrong, so I returned to the faucet (I have a VPN to a second location, sorry for that, I will return the money) and asked again for money, this time to 1B3XG5dYTg7xKyYQGkbuohEGQq3Xhmttf5.
Again the faucet said money was on its way.

Still, for 2 hours I saw NOTHING in the bitcoin interface.
I also checked block explorer to see if there was some transaction to me, but nothing.
I thought there was a bug somewhere, maybe in the faucet?

After 2 hours, there they are! Appearing on my bitcoin interface.

Two hours? Is the latency of this software *so bad*?
Reading the forum I had the impression that propagation of (unconfirmed) transactions was almost instantaneous, and one had to wait 20-30 minutes only for reaching a safer confirmation depth.
Is the latency so bad or is there there a bug / latency in bitcoin faucet?

Another strange thing is this:
When the two transaction appeared on my interface, one was with "2 / unconfirmed" and the other with "5 / unconfirmed". At the next block one was "3 / unconfirmed" and the other was "6 confirmed". The lowest numbered one also got "confirmation" at depth 6. The strange thing was that from block explorer I was seeing the so-called "unconfirmed" transaction into a block, and such block was already received by my bitcoin p2p (I could see that from the number in the status bar), so why does the p2p software calls such transaction "unconfirmed"?

Thank you

[ribuck]

1. You probably visited the Bitcoin Faucet while your newly-installed Bitcoin client was downloading and indexing the initial block chain. In that case, your Bitcoin transaction wouldn't show up until you downloaded the end of the block chain. Future transactions should indeed show up in a few seconds.

2. Even if you have seen a transaction in the block chain, there is a small possibility that there is more than one version of the block chain floating around the network. When everything settles, the block chain supported by the majority of the network will be propagated and the other version(s) will die out. The more blocks since your transaction, the greater the chance that the block containing your transaction will become permanent. Waiting for six confirmations is arbitrary, but it seems to be plenty for most purposes.

[caveden]

If you had just installed, maybe your client was still downloading the block chain. That may take some hours.
But it's true, the unconfirmed transactions should have been displayed right from the beginning as far as I know... maybe while downloading the block chain the client ignores the notifications about new transactions? This would make some sense, since downloading the chain consumes lots of bandwidth, better not mind about new transactions.

[foof]

No no,
sorry for not making it clear upfront: the block chain was already fully downloaded since yesterday. I was in sync with block explorer.

Ribuck, 2: It's difficult to believe this was the reason for 2 hours. Also, in that time my transaction should have floated around as unconfirmed, and hence be visible from the p2p interface. Also, the block explorer itself listed the transaction after 2 hours.

If you confirm me that transactions only take a few seconds...  (that's good news indeed)
Would anyone mind to test the faucet today? Then you can return the money...

Thank you

[Binford 6100]

If you confirm me that transactions only take a few seconds...  (that's good news indeed)

i do a lot of transfer between web based wallet and pc client and the transactions are faster than "few seconds"
100% i saw the transaction in client as unconfirmed when i switched apps (browser to bitcoin client)

either bitcoin transaction could not make it into the block as the free space was already occupied
or i have no other explanation for you

[Gavin Andresen]

Here's what happens when you press the Get Some button on the Faucet and it sends you coins:

+ A Google App Engine task is scheduled to actually do the send.

+ The send tasks are (currently) scheduled to run at most once per minute, so huge spikes in demand for coins from the faucet are smoothed out.

The nice thing about App Engine tasks is that they're persistent little buggers-- they'll keep going until they succeed.  If the send fails for some reason (I need to restart bitcoind for some reason, or the connection between the Google and my bitcoind server is down), App Engine will reschedule the task to try again after an hour.

So, you were probably just very unlucky and the send failed twice in a row, OR you on the tail end of a couple hundred people all asking for coins at about the same time (the faucet will service a maximum of 120 requests in two hours).