I made a sample smart contract and wanted to deploy it. I used mist wallet to do that and everything seems to be ok except the transaction is still in "pending" mode.
Can you hightlight common practices for deploying a smart contract and common issues?
As per my understanding, the time taken to get a smart contract deployed has no difference compared to the time taken for a transaction to be mined, since deploying a contract itself is a transaction. Hence the gas price you define matter when getting a priority in the pending transaction queue.
Probably the reason behind the latency should be the low gas price when compared to the current network status, in your case as well.
You may refer this question.
Can you hightlight common practices for deploying a smart contract and common issues?
What you are referring here is the moment of sending it to the blockchain, it's all about transactions. But if you consider the development as well, thses aspects of unit testing, testing,securing are important.
You don't need a updated (downloaded) blockchain to deploy a contract. The time it takes to deploy is the time it takes to be included in a block, which is mainly decided by the gas-price you are willing to pay and how full the blocks are.
Normal (as of 2017) is ~5-10 gwei per gas in order to get included within the first 1-5 min. I see you paid 3 gwei which might be a reason for the delay if there were network congestion at the same time.
