How long can you complete atomic transactions?

Question

Looking at atomic transactions, how long do the following stages allow for completion?

Preparelockunspent - when one side completes this, at what point can this no longer be used for to createrawexchange?

Once side 2 completes appendrawexchange with their preparelockunspent text, how long will that transaction allow for the sendrawtransaction to be completed?

We have noticed that if we leave transactions uncompleted for some time, we receive error messages when going through the final steps. Does disconnecting your server destroy these partially completed transactions?

Lastly, does the amount of open transactions at the steps above  have any impact on the completion success?

Answer 1

The locking of a transaction output (i.e. after preparelockunspent) happens within the individual node's wallet only, and is not reflected in any blockchain transaction. The locking is also lost if a node is stopped and restarted. Apart from that, so long as the transaction outputs used by an exchange transaction remain unspent, that exchange can be transmitted at any time in future. And the number of other locked transaction outputs (or your term, "open transactions") has no effect on this.

Comments

Thank you for the response.  Is there a way to kill transactions?  For example, you complete a createrawexchange, transmit the hex to the other party, but they have taken too long to complete the transaction from their end and I want to back out of the offer.

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Yes, you just need to spend one of the inputs of the exchange. The disablerawtransaction API takes care of it for you.