[Icecast] Client has fallen too far behind

[Ross Levis]

Another possible reason is the speed of the encoding is different to the speed of the playback device. Hardware soundcard chips are
often responsible for the speed of encoding and playback, and these are not 100% accurate.  Although more accurate than computer
clocks.

We have an Icecast stream being played by a dedicated playback device used for a studio to transmitter link, and it gets further and
further behind over several days or weeks of continuous play. Occasionally there is a pause when Icecast drops the stream and the
device reconnects. This is on a local network so not related to bandwidth issues.

For others, the opposite is also possible where the playback device is playing slightly slower than the encoder and the playback
buffer eventually gets full and the playback device has to drop some audio causing a short skip.
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Icecast [mailto:icecast-bounces at xiph.org] On Behalf Of Marvin Scholz
Sent: Friday, 15 October 2021 7:19 am
To: Icecast streaming server user discussions
Subject: Re: [Icecast] Client has fallen too far behind



On 14 Oct 2021, at 19:22, Milton Huang wrote:

> I'm new to Icecast and this mailing list. I have set it up to run a
> continuous (unending) audio stream that is being generated by a Python
> script.  In my log I found an entry that said:
>
> [2021-09-17  06:03:53] INFO source/send_to_listener Client 620
> (XX.XX.XX.XXX) has fallen too far behind, removing
>
> The user gets kicked, and the listener count decreases.
>
> What does this mean? Is the client pausing too long or getting out of 
> sync
> somehow?

Hi,

clients falling behind can have various reasons. Generally it means that
the listener client is at the end of Icecasts buffer, the size of which 
is
configured with the queue-size option in the icecast.xml.

One reason for the client falling behind could be that the client is on
a slow network connection and can therefore not keep up with the live 
stream.

Depending on how the client is implemented, it could be that it indeed
does not handle pausing properly, though with most clients that 
shouldn't
be an issue anymore.

Yet another although rarer reason could be that you are streaming with a 
very
high bandwidth, like for a video stream and did not adjust the buffer to
be large enough.

> What is the best way for me to learn what is happening, and how to 
> prevent
> it?

There is not much you can do about without knowing exactly the reason 
why
the specific client disconnected. And even then, as described above 
might
be just a slow network connection. Seeing these messages about a client
being dropped is not that unusual.

However if you can reproduce this with your listener client, then you 
should check
the logs of the client

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