Question about pending transactions

Question

I am running loads of transactions in a private POA network, even a few per seconds. The nonces are being managed by a specific service. The issue I encountered was that one sealer somehow didn't manage to mine a transaction (it wasn't reverted) and the next 40-50 transactions were staying in pending tx pool, due to the nonce gap. My question is what would web3.eth.getTransactionCount(sender_address, 'pending') return in this case? The nonce of the unprocessed transaction or NUMBER_OF_MINED_TX_FOR_SENDER + PENDING_TX_COUNT_FOR_SENDER? Or something else?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

If there is a nonce gap, the call will not take those transactions into consideration.

This means, that a call to:

web3.eth.getTransactionCount(sender_address, 'pending')

Will return NUMBER_OF_MINED_TX_FOR_SENDER + PENDING_TX_COUNT_FOR_SENDER only for the transactions that have sequential nonces, without any gap.

But it will take into consideration the not mined transactions that have sequential, non-gapped nonce.