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[Bug]: Syncing is broken between multiple tabs in the same browser instance #553
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Reference: github-starred/actual#553
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Originally created by @Cldfire on GitHub (Aug 8, 2023).
Verified issue does not already exist?
What happened?
On the v23.8.1 release, creating a new budget file immediately yields constant and unfixable sync errors if more than a single client is connected:
https://github.com/actualbudget/actual/assets/13814214/e845576b-56ab-4251-902f-5560f11f6a55
What error did you receive?
No response
Where are you hosting Actual?
Docker
What browsers are you seeing the problem on?
Safari
Operating System
Mac OSX
@Cldfire commented on GitHub (Aug 8, 2023):
The Merkle hash is always undefined, I'm guessing that's very much not supposed to be the case.
@Cldfire commented on GitHub (Aug 9, 2023):
Full console logs as after looking at the code I realize they're pertinent to the failure here:
@Cldfire commented on GitHub (Aug 9, 2023):
Update, I have discovered that
currentMerkle = merkle.insert(currentMerkle, timestamp);never seems to run in Safari in theapplyMessagesfunction for some reason. Firefox does not appear to have this issue.Since the current Merkle is never updated we never realize that we're back in sync with the server, so syncing always fails.
@Cldfire commented on GitHub (Aug 9, 2023):
This seems to be the case because
messages = await compareMessages(messages);is resulting in an emptymessagesarray in Safari, in this bit here:@Cldfire commented on GitHub (Aug 9, 2023):
Oh nope, this is very much not a Safari-specific issue. It happens in Firefox as well. As soon as you open two tabs in the same browser instance these problems start to happen. You can also get into a situation where it says the database image is malformed until you reload the page.
Seems to be something going wrong because both tabs in the same browser are (presumably) sharing the same underlying database.
So in the case where you get the "out of sync error", the tab you click sync in goes to receive messages and apply them, but because the messages already exist in the database it thinks it's already applied them (even though it hasn't in memory). It can't handle this situation and therefore errors.
And then in other cases you just get a malformed database error and that's that.
Cross-client syncing is working fine for me as long as I don't have more than one client tab open in the same browser instance (no browser tabs sharing a database).
@Cldfire commented on GitHub (Aug 9, 2023):
Spent some more time poking at this tonight and I feel like a service worker that handles all database interaction is the answer to this problem. That way 2+ tab scenarios all go through a shared worker and we can handle things better. It should also allow us to return to the state shown in this video: https://twitter.com/jlongster/status/1241040807093768194
@nardz13 commented on GitHub (Nov 5, 2025):
still seeing this issue.
@joelson-c commented on GitHub (Nov 7, 2025):
I happened to reproduce this bug while setting up
#template schedulefor a lot of categories (Windows 11/Chrome/Release 25.10). I gonna take a look at this in the next couple of days.@jbschooley commented on GitHub (Jan 10, 2026):
I see this every time I try to run 2 tabs in the same browser. Separate browser works...but it would be nice to open multiple tabs without having to sign in and download the database to every one.
@MG2R commented on GitHub (Jan 17, 2026):
Another data point. Hosted on docker, running in Firefox with multi-account containers plugin (so I can open multiple budgets at the same time). Opening the same budget twice in the same firefox container will introduce this bug. OS is Linux.