Storage sometimes not working correctly

[danfinlay]

We've had a variety of user reports that resemble our storage strategy intermittently failing:

• New accounts suddenly not existing
• New transactions disappearing from the list
• New nicknames reverting to an old state.

We should investigate how storage failures are handled, make them less likely, and maybe fail more gracefully.

[danfinlay]

This could be related to a stream break we saw in the past. If so, this could be reproduced by removing the debouncer from our background.js disk writing stream.

[danfinlay]

Aaron has seen the first two bullet points happen live, with the app open, which suggests it may not be a storage bug at all, since we only read from storage when starting up the application.

[danfinlay]

Could this be related to #4145?

[MM263]

Hi, I've discovered a behaviour that might be related to this, but might as well be it's own issue.
We were creating a sign-in page, which utilizes Metamask for logging in. That means that we were creating a very large amount of accounts daily (30-100) for testing purposes and after that we were deleting them.

We have discovered that after deleting an account it can be saved by Metamask and instead of generating new wallet when creating a new account Metamask uses an old wallet, that has been removed. Reinstalling Metamask extension removes this behavior, old wallets do not appear when creating a new account after reinstall.

Yesterday I've encountered a bug where 6 accounts just disappeared and after that when I was creating new accounts they had the same wallet addresses.

[bdresser]

@danfinlay several user reports of adding tokens then having them disappear, and having transaction history disappear as well. are these handled by the same storage mechanism, or handled separately?

[danfinlay]

@bdresser Yes, this is almost definitely a storage failure of some kind.

[danfinlay]

Reproduction steps:

• Add log to our disk writing logic.
• Remove the debounce from the storage stream in background.js, and go about using the application.
• Extension seems to silently fail writing to disk.

[kumavis]

Fixed by #4570