Getting 'base fee exceeds gas limit' on a transaction which requires a small amount of gas

Question

I have the following contract:

pragma solidity ^0.4.24;

contract MyContract {
    address public owner;
    bool public unlocked;

    constructor() public {
        owner = msg.sender;
        unlocked = true;
    }

    function lock() external {
        require(owner == msg.sender);
        unlocked = false;
    }
}

I run Ganache v6.1.0 configured with --gasLimit=0xfffffffffff and --port=8545.

Then, I upload this contract and try to invoke the lock method via web3 v1.0.0-beta.34:

let fs = require("fs");
let Web3 = require("web3");

let web3 = new Web3("http://localhost:8545");

async function deploy(contractName) {
    let abi = fs.readFileSync(contractName + ".abi").toString();
    let bin = fs.readFileSync(contractName + ".bin").toString();
    let contract = new web3.eth.Contract(JSON.parse(abi));
    let handle = await send(contract.deploy({data: "0x" + bin}));
    return new web3.eth.Contract(JSON.parse(abi), handle.contractAddress);
}

async function send(transaction) {
    let gas = await transaction.estimateGas({from: PUBLIC_KEY});
    let options = {
        to  : transaction._parent._address,
        data: transaction.encodeABI(),
        gas : gas
    };
    let signedTransaction = await web3.eth.accounts.signTransaction(options, PRIVATE_KEY);
    let receipt = await web3.eth.sendSignedTransaction(signedTransaction.rawTransaction);
    return receipt;
}

async function execute() {
    let myContract = await deploy("MyContract");
    let transaction = myContract.methods.lock();
    await send(transaction);
}

execute();

Calling execute() --> send(transaction) --> web3.eth.sendSignedTransaction(...) yields:

base fee exceeds gas limit

Any idea what's causing this?

The only observation that I've found useful so far, is that this specific transaction requires a very small amount of gas (around 13000) in comparison with at least twice for any other transaction executed in my script.

By the way, this problem does not occur when I use Parity instead of Ganache.

Perhaps this is another hint.

Thank you!

Answer 1

I believe this is a ganache bug in eth_estimateGas relating to how gas refunds are calculated. (13000 is less than the minimum transaction cost of 21000.)

Incidentally, it looks like perhaps the bug was just fixed? See https://github.com/trufflesuite/ganache-core/issues/26.

It might be worth grabbing the latest source from GitHub and testing against that.