is there a safe and reliable way to make transfers using the RPC API? If you just call "transfer", sometimes it can take forever for the wallet to actually build the transaction

as I imagine it, an ideal solution would be to get an immediate response from the wallet daemon, with some kind of an ID you could use to track the transaction state

Try with --no-dns and see if that helps with the pauses.

this is a wallet that receives a lot of small transactions and sometimes needs to make big outgoing transactions with many inputs, I might be wrong, but I it spends the majority of the time actually building the transaction to sign

I notice that outgoing transfers are almost immediate when they only require small amounts of inputs

I guess I could call "transfer" with "do_not_relay" and "get_tx_hex" to safely build the transaction, then later relay that with submit_transfer?

My main concern is something going wrong during the transfer phase, which can sometimes take multiple minutes, and then having to retry the transaction (dangerous) or manually check to see if it ended up being succesfully sent or not

Minutes to build a transaction sounds strange. I doubt that the sheer number of outputs drives tx build time up to minutes.

I also made txs with large numbers of input at times and can't remember wait times of minutes

Do you work with your own daemon, or with a remote one?