## TL;DR

If you add/remove a variant (string value) the API response is not update. But if you change other settings like "default value", then it API response reflects the right amount of variants.

## Steps

1. Issue growthbook/growthbook#971 (closed, 12 comments): Summary If in out self-hosted GrowthBook instance (latest docker image) we experienced a bug in the API feature endpoint. If you add/remove a variant (string value) the API response is not update. But if you change other settings like "default value", then it API response reflects the right amount of variants. Expected Behavior API endpoint reflects the current state of the configuration after each kind of changes.

2. The GrowthBook API feature endpoint can lag after adding or removing variants because the feature payload is expensive to generate, so it's generated and cached in Mongo whenever a feature changes. In eventually consistent setups the cache can be stale. The maintainer's guidance: the only really safe setup is preferring reads from primaries, since there can be 200ms replication spikes. If your self-hosted GrowthBook API returns stale feature flags after edits, look at your Mongo read preference first.

## When to use

You are seeing this: Issue growthbook/growthbook#971 (closed, 12 comments): Summary If in out self-hosted GrowthBook instance (latest docker image) we experienced a bug in the API feature endpoint. Use this skill when you run into "no API response update after adding/removing variants".

## When not to use

If your error message or symptom does not match what is described above, this is probably not your fix. Search for your exact error text instead of forcing this one to fit.

## Versions

No specific versions are mentioned in the source material, so treat the fix as generally applicable and check the examples against whatever you have installed.

## Why this happens

The original report does not dig into a root cause. It documents the symptom and the fix that resolved it.

## Sources

- https://github.com/growthbook/growthbook/issues/971