What does unbroadcast mean? What does it mean for a transaction to be successfully broadcast?

Question

What does "unbroadcast" mean? What does it mean for a transaction to be "successfully" broadcast?

These questions were asked in this Bitcoin Core PR review club on PR 2261 hosted by Gloria Zhao and have been paraphrased.

Answer 1

Amiti Uttarwar answered this in this Bitcoin Core PR review club session on the PR 18038 in April 2020.

Unbroadcast (introduced in PR 18038) is defined as when the initial broadcast of a transaction hasn't been deemed successful. Every 10-15 minutes a node re-attempts broadcast of unbroadcast transactions.

An initial broadcast is deemed successful by the mempool if it receives a single GETDATA request for that transaction (ie a peer requests the data for that transaction). The mempool keeps track of transactions that it initially broadcasts and maintains a set of unbroadcast transactions containing the txids. It doesn't necessarily know the reason for a "failure". It may be that the transaction was dropped and didn't reach peers or it may be the case that peers weren't interested in that transaction for some reason. Peers are unlikely to already know about the transaction as it was originated by the source of the initial broadcast.