We were sending device updates down both the federation stream and
device streams. This mean there was a race if the federation sender
worker processed the federation stream first, as when the sender checked
if there were new device updates the slaved ID generator hadn't been
updated with the new stream IDs and so returned nothing.
This situation is correctly handled by events/receipts/etc by not
sending updates down the federation stream and instead having the
federation sender worker listen on the other streams and poke the
transaction queues as appropriate.
Erik Johnston