Transaction stuck in the Memory Pool for too long

Hey everyone, I just picked up a new laptop for my day-to-day stuff and installed Bitcoin Core, running it as a pruned node. I signed a transaction using my offline Bitcoin Core node. After that, I moved the PSBT to my online pruned Bitcoin Core setup. Even though I used a pretty decent fee (~3.5 sats/vB), my transaction has been hanging in the memory pool for over 30 minutes. Can someone shed some light on why this is happening? I kinda appreciate these hiccups since they help me get more comfortable with Core. Here's a screenshot from when it was still sitting in the mempool: Tip: It seems like my node is a bit slow to update. Right now, it shows my transaction as 1/unconfirmed, but it’s actually confirmed!

Is your Current block height (CTRL-I to see it) lagging by any chance?

Hi Loyce, no I've checked that. Is it perhaps because of my VPN? I checked with my VPN turned off, and it has the same issue, that's why I'm kinda confuzed. Not a huge deal,

I don't think a VPN matters. If your node is up to date, it should know which address is confirmed.

This is pretty normal. I think it's not caused by the VPN since it's set to prune; it discards the old block first before downloading the latest block, validating, and rescanning. Or maybe the peers you are currently connecting to are currently not providing the latest data, which is causing the delay. I'd like you to try increasing the dbcache and maxconnections. It might help speed things up, and having more peers might help receive the latest data faster than using the default.

I believe it's all about how fast your node catches up with the rest of the network. The confirmation of your transaction actually depends on if it has been included in a block and not just it sitting in the mempool. Remember that your node actually has to download and fully validate that new block containing your transaction before it can officially update its status to confirmed. So there's  actually a very high chance that what what you're seeing is a temporary lag in synchronization. Your pruned node should  be working  fine since it could correctly identify the transaction in the mempool but is waiting to process the block itself to reflect that it. is now confirmed. Check your network speed because sometimes it can contribute to this lag too.

I guess my observation was just an isolated event. I tried 3 more transactions in the exact same way and it worked flawlessly! I should lock the thread now! Thanks for the responses!