Failed to get socket connection from UnityShaderCompiler.exe

Unity Engine
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Over and over and over again. It all started with Unity crashing after a script upgrade, I relaunched Unity to check whether I see more info in Editor.log, but the Unity didn’t open, I opened Unity Hub, clicked my project and it appears to be loading (I get the splash screen with Unity logo on it, the one you get before project opens). It appears a new line is added every some 8 seconds to Editor.Log and its exactly same line:

Failed to get socket connection from UnityShaderCompiler.exe shader compiler! D:/Applications/Unity Editors/2019.2.15f1/Editor/Data/Tools/UnityShaderCompiler.exe
(Filename: C:\buildslave\unity\build\Tools/UnityShaderCompiler/ShaderCompilerClient.cpp Line: 337)

“UnityShaderCompiler” does exist in given location and is 2.01MB and there are no other errors from Editor.log (the error lines are preceded with standard Unity lines).

I looked up on the internet, but it appears people are using something called “Jenkins” to build their game, which I don’t use. So how do I get back to work with my own project?

2

Had the same error turned out that I forgot to turn of my VPN - unity and VPN are not able to be going at the same time?

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3

This was incredibly frustrating to debug, and the fix was ridiculously easy. Turning off my VPN worked for me, but I can’t really see how or why it would be an issue to run a VPN at the same time!

Thanks for your post Gritnz :slight_smile:

4

Unity is using network communication on 127.0.0.1 (Your local machine) to communicate between multible external components like the UnityShaderCompiler.
If your VPN client is intercepting this internal network traffic and is trying to rout it thou its tunnel this connections will fail and unity is stuck waiting until the connection is timed out and then throwing this error.

Some VPN clients work better then other in this case.
A popular vpn client that is causing this is the NordVPN client. Many users reported that switching to the open vpn client with there NordVPN login data they did not have this trouble.

The sad part is that unity cant relay fix it, but they could include a better error message that would lead users to a workaround.

2 Likes
5

Just to add another way this can occur. Firewall. Was greeted with this error on first run of version 2020.1.3f1.

Was not running VPN. But, had ufw fire wall active:

sudo systemctl stop ufw.service

Once ufw was stopped, the error was not present at startup.

On cursory glance, I think I just need to tell ufw to allow 127.0.0.1 to access 127.0.0.1 UDP port 53:

[UFW AUDIT] IN= OUT=lo SRC=127.0.0.1 DST=127.0.0.53 LEN=67 TOS=0x00 PREC=0x00 TTL=64 ID=29158 DF PROTO=UDP SPT=59020 DPT=53 LEN=47

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