Frequently Asked Questions

The waitForInitialization option in Statsig's React SDK is used to delay the rendering of your components until the SDK has finished initializing. This ensures that the correct feature gate values are available when your components are rendered. If you're seeing users in the "uninitialized" group, it could mean that the SDK initialization is not yet complete when the feature gate check is being made. This could be due to a slow network connection or other issues that delay the initialization process.

To resolve this, you could consider increasing the initTimeoutMS value, which gives the SDK more time to complete the network roundtrip before falling back to cached values. You could also use the init callback for debugging to check when it's returning. If the issue persists, it might be worth considering using a server SDK on one of your servers to bootstrap with. This way, if you already have a network request serving stuff to your clients, you can have it evaluate the user and pass those values back without needing a roundtrip to the SDK.

Remember, the initCalled: true value doesn't necessarily mean the initialization succeeded. It's important to check for any errors thrown from the initialization method. If you're trying to avoid unnecessary updateUser calls, consider building a statsigUser and only call for update if the local statsigUser is different from the one saved in the SDK instance.

If you set waitForInitialization off, you should get the uninitialized check, and then once SDK initialization completes (within 3 seconds), you should get another check with the actual value (assuming the network request was successful for initialization).

Statsig is working on the metadata around these cases to make it easier to debug. In new SDK versions, it will be possible to differentiate them a bit more. There are also plans to make a change to React that won't even render the children until initialization has at least started so there won't be uninitialized checks at first. This is due to the ordering of effects, where SDK hooks will run before the SDK initialization path in the provider.