More than 64 connections

[Arun Raghavan]

Hi Julien,

On Wed, 2 Oct 2024, at 8:38 AM, jargaud at tixeo.com wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I need to connect more than 64 clients to a PulseAudio server 
> (PulseAudio 16.1 on Debian 12), 100 to be exact.
> From the 65th client, I cannot retrieve the list of devices. I've seen 
> this warning in journalctl:
> Warning! Too many connections (64), dropping incoming connection.
>
> I've seen the limitation in pulsecore/protocol-esound.c :
> #define MAX_CONNECTIONS 64

You want protocol-native.c, not protocol-esound.c.

> Could anyone confirm the following points:
>  1. To modify this limit, there is no other way than to download, 
> modify and build the PulseAudio sources (i've searched among the 
> configuration files without result).

That is correct.

>  2. Changing this limit to 100 won't affect the PulseAudio performance 
> too much.

It should be fine, at least in so far as you have the resources to serve up whatever the clients need. I believe this define was just set a long time ago, and we've not really had much pull to change this.

If you find yourself switching to PipeWire and using the pipewire-pulse bridge, the max clients can be changed in configuration there.

Cheers,
Arun