mediasoup in a docker image running alpine:latest is problematic

Greetings,

Just a heads up before anyone spends hours upon hours troubleshooting this. The TL;DR - mediasoup under an alpine:latest (v3.16 at the time of this post) is problematic, save yourself the trouble an build your container using ubuntu/debian.

My application was working just fine and I decided to containerize it to make it a bit more portable. I built the docker container exactly how it should have been built, but I decided to use alpine:latest due to the incredibly small size of the containers (I use alpine for nearly everything including the mediasoup signaling).

However, I immediately started experiencing trouble which did not occur when I was not containerized. I assumed this was network related due to the symptoms, but I discovered after some troubleshooting that it was related entirely to the use of an alpine docker image.

Here are the symptoms -

mediasoup workers run per usual but odd stream issues will start surfacing after a very short while. Streams seem to no longer isolated from interfering with other streams, for example if a new consume attempts to consume from an existing producer that other consumers are listening to, those other consumers will temporarily lose their streams which will eventually start up again. Closing a consumer/transport will also cause other consumers to experience a temporary loss until the stream recovers.

Simply shifting your docker container over to ubuntu:latest (at the time of this post that is 22.04) allows mediasoup to work flawlessly. I haven’t tested with any other images, but I assume any full traditional container w/ GNU libc would probably work and containers which use musl libc may be problematic.

If you have insight as to why mediasoup has issues with alpine / alpine:latest under docker (possibly outside of docker too?), feel free to share.

Thanks!
Rucio

This is not the first issue I’ve heard about related to alphine Linux Docker images but this is the weirdest one…