[Icecast] Stream Interruption Troubleshooting

Mon Mar 3 12:48:46 UTC 2014

Dear All,

Icecast makes it possible that our Community/Student radio station reaches
online listeners and it's FM transmitter. Operating with little or not
budget, I've set up our streaming several times. Lately we are experiencing
audio glitches and dropouts out of nowhere (setup hasn't changed
tremendously). Similar cases I found on the list and elsewhere don't give
general troubleshooting procedures, so here is what's going on.

Problem: Clients connecting to mountpoints on any server with same source
get noticeable audio glitches/stuttering and audio dropouts (approximately
every 120s). On rare and random occasions it normalizes.

Resolving Steps:
- Tried different streaming formats (OPUS, MP3, OGG) and source software
(butt, opus-econder, Altacast)
- Different servers produce similar effects with same source.
- When streaming with alternative service (http://mixlr.com/ 96kbps MP3
over Amazon Cloud Services) no stuttering is present.

Any ideas? Clock drift? How to solve it?
Thank you! I'll be glad to update with progress or additional info if
required.
Below are logs and all.

Kind regards,
Luka Cvetko
MARŠ, student radio station of Maribor (http://radiomars.si/)

-----------------

Test Stream: http://frekvenca.eu:8000/radiomars.mp3 (LAME MP3 128kbps
44,1kHz Stereo)
Source Specs: Intel Core 2 Duo E7500 @ 2,93 GHz (20% utilized), 4GB RAM
(1,09 GB utilized), 64-bit Windows 7 Professional
Source Client: edcast-reborn ASIO 3.37.2011.1214 (Foucusrite Scarlet 2i4
s/c 10ms set latency)
Source Network: 100Mbit shared link (results: )
Production Server:  VPS i686-architecture VT-x @ 3,0 GHz, 1024 MB RAM (884
MB utilized), 32-bit Debian with icecast-2.3.2-kh29
Production Server Network: 100Mbit link guaranteed (avg. 176ms ping from/to
source)
Test Server: VPS i686 architecture VT-x @ 2,29 GHz (0.3% utilized), 512 MB
RAM (45 MB utilized), 32-bit Debian with icecast-2.3.3-kh9 (self-compiled)
Test Network: 100 Mbits guaranteeed (avg. 39ms ping from/to source)
Transmitter Client: Raspbberry Pi Model B with Liquidsoap script
Transmitter Client Network: 100Mbps guaranteed (no ping due to NAT)
Test Client: 2 Intel Xeon @ 2,26 GHz, 6B RAM with OS X 10.9.1
Test Client Network: 20Mbps guaranteed

Test Client (OS X/VLC) Output on Glich:

main warning: playback too early (-40063): down-sampling
> main error: ES_OUT_SET_(GROUP_)PCR  is called too late (jitter of 5201 ms
> ignored)
> main error: ES_OUT_RESET_PCR called
> main debug: Buffering 0%
> main debug: End of audio preroll
> main debug: Buffering 1%
> ...
> main debug: Buffering 99%
> main debug: Stream buffering done (5982 ms in 5897 ms)
> main debug: Decoder buffering done in 0 ms
> main debug: playback too late (16241): flushing buffers

Production Sever icecast.xml

<clients>50</clients>
> <sources>5</sources>
> <queue-size>2097152</queue-size>
> <
> client-timeout>60</client-timeout>
> <header-timeout>10</header-timeout>
> <source-timeout>20</source-timeout>
> <burst-size>32000</burst-size>
> <max-bandwidth>100M</max-bandwidth>

Test Server icecast.xml

<clients>50</clients>
> <sources>5</sources>
> <queue-size>2097152</queue-size>
> <client-timeout>60</client-timeout>
> <header-timeout>10</header-timeout>
> <source-timeout>20</source-timeout>

Production Server error.log (omitted source_listener_count)

[2014-03-03  11:39:51] EROR yp/send_to_yp YP add on
> http://openradiodirectory.org/yp.php failed: ADD failed due to a
> technical glitch on our end. Please try later.
> [2014-03-03  11:39:51] EROR yp/send_to_yp YP add on
> http://dir.xiph.org/cgi-bin/yp-cgi/yp-url failed: no response from server
> [2014-03-03  11:40:47] INFO source/source_add_listener max on
> /radiomars.mp3 is -1 (cur 3)
> [2014-03-03  11:43:27] INFO source/send_listener Client 184283
> (217.17.216.82) has fallen too far behind, removing
> [2014-03-03  11:56:50] INFO source/send_listener Client 184271
> (109.123.7.74) has fallen too far behind, removing
> [2014-03-03  12:36:57] INFO source/send_listener Client 184289
> (178.216.61.130) has fallen too far behind, removing
>

Production Server access.log

217.17.216.82 - - [03/Mar/2014:11:43:27 +0100] "GET /radiomars.mp3
> HTTP/1.1" 200 163368 "-" "-" 160
> 109.123.7.74 - - [03/Mar/2014:11:56:50 +0100] "GET /radiomars.mp3
> HTTP/1.1" 200 13709339 "
> http://d3bwsr3zpy54hy.cloudfront.net/201402271616/js/lib/swf/player-AS3.swf"
> "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 9.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/5.0)" 1065
> 46.150.33.248 - - [03/Mar/2014:12:27:15 +0100] "GET /radiomars.mp3
> HTTP/1.1" 200 35549402 "-" "VLC/2.1.4 LibVLC/2.1.4" 2360
> 46.137.65.100 - - [03/Mar/2014:12:32:40 +0100] "GET /radiomars.mp3
> HTTP/1.0" 200 9939 "-" "iTunes/4.7.1 (Unix; N; linux; x86_64-linux; EN;
> utf8) SqueezeNetwork/10.0.2-sn/TRUNK" 1
> 95.112.1.123 - - [03/Mar/2014:12:34:06 +0100] "GET /radiomars.mp3
> HTTP/1.0" 200 1259851 "-" "iTunes/4.7.1 (Unix; N; linux; x86_64-linux; EN;
> utf8) SqueezeNetwork/10.0.2-sn/TRUNK" 86
> 178.216.61.130 - - [03/Mar/2014:12:36:57 +0100] "GET /radiomars.mp3
> HTTP/1.0" 200 58833 "
> http://www.lemon-radio.com/lemon-radio-podatki/lemon_radio.swf/[[DYNAMIC]]/3"
> "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko" 141
> 46.150.33.248 - - [03/Mar/2014:12:45:59 +0100] "GET /radiomars.mp3
> HTTP/1.1" 200 3840826 "-" "VLC/2.1.4 LibVLC/2.1.4" 264
> 109.182.56.71 - - [03/Mar/2014:12:58:23 +0100] "GET /radiomars.mp3
> HTTP/1.0" 200 4460125 "-" "WinampMPEG/5.62, Ultravox/2.1" 300
> 62.75.143.21 - - [03/Mar/2014:13:00:22 +0100] "GET /radiomars.mp3.m3u
> HTTP/1.1" 200 90 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible;)" 0
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