Error transferring balance. Runs out of gas

Question

This is probably a simple problem to fix, but it is very frustrating.

I am developing in Solidity using Remix 0.5.10.

I have a loan contract that collects funds from borrowers. I now want to collect those funds and pass them through to the portfolio which owns those loans. The code is as follows:

        function passThrough() payable public
        {
        address(portfolio).transfer(address(this).balance);
        }

The error I get is:

**Gas Estimation Fail**
Gas estimation errored with the following message (see below). 
The transaction execution will likely fail. Do you want to force sending?
Internal JSON-RPC error.

If I do press Send Anyway, I get the following error:

I would have thought that gas will just be taken from the amount sent correct? Or do I need to reduce the amount snet by the estimated amount of gas explicitly?

@Ismael: Regarding your question, yes Portfolio is a contract and it has a fallback function which is as follows:

function () payable external {
    // fallback function to receive funds
    received = msg.value;
    availableFunds += received;
    } // function () payable external {

After trying Ismael's suggestion, I have changed the call as follows:

    address(portfolio).call.gas(100000).value(address(this).balance);

I also tried:

    address(portfolio).call.value(address(this).balance).gas(100000)("");

Neither worked. They do not throw up an error, however, for some reason the funds are not transferred. Now I am really confused. I understand the point about not enough gas, but with that solved and the transaction completing succesfully, why is the value not also sent? I did check to make sure that there was a balance to send, by the way!

I really appreciate your feedback. Thanks.

Answer 1

I don't know why your contract is failing but the following snippet works in remix. I've changed to use gasleft() instead of hardcoding a default value.

pragma solidity >=0.4.22 <0.6.0;

contract Back {
    uint availableFunds;

    event Received(uint);

    function () external payable {
        uint received = msg.value;
        availableFunds += received;
        emit Received(received);
    }

    function total() public view returns (uint) {
        return address(this).balance;
    }
}


contract Front {
    Back public back;

    event Created(address);
    event Received(uint);

    constructor() public {
        back = new Back();
        emit Created(address(back));
    }

    function () external payable {
        emit Received(msg.value);
    }

    function forward() public payable {
        address(back).call.value(address(this).balance).gas(gasleft())("");
    }

    function total() public view returns (uint) {
        return address(this).balance;
    }
}

Answer 2

So I finally figured it out. Thanks to all of you for your contributions! I really appreciate it. I figured out a really simple solution that works well and requires less gas.

I added a function receiveFunds to the Portfolio contract:

function receiveFunds() public payable {
    // function to receive funds
    received = msg.value;
    availableFunds += received;
} // function receiveFunds() public payable {

Then in the Loan contract I used the following call:

function passThrough() payable public
    {
    // Passthrough funds
    portfolio.receiveFunds.value(address(this).balance)();
    }

This worked perfectly. The remaining question is why this works whereas the call function did not. I would be very interested in any ideas why!

Thanks again to everyone who helped!

Answer 3

I think It's only warning from Remix IDE due to it cannot perform estimated gas properly because EVM don't know what is in address of portfolio. If it's smart contract then the gas used will be difference because smart contract can have fallback function to do other things also.

You still can force send the tnx by clicking on Send Transaction button.