@andrewg The command is: gpg --keyserver-options no-self-sigs-only,no-import-clean --keyserver hkps://example.com/ --refresh-keys ... using our company key server. The server component is integrated into our company backend and thus, no standard FOSS OpenPGP server product. It's implemented according to the standards and therefore, each standard-conform implementation should have that issue with gnupg versions: 2.4.4 2.4.7 2.4.8 2.5.18 In our understanding, this is a bug in gnupg (client). To simulate the behavior, you need a (test) setup with number of keys > chunk size (need to analyze gnupg source for that) + at least 1 key where this is the only key matching a keyserver entry and all the others not. HTH