shadowsocks/shadowsocks-rust · critical

all plugins are exited. all connections may fail, check your

Error message

all plugins are exited. all connections may fail, check your configuration

What it means

The load-balancer's plugin supervisor task panics when every external plugin process (e.g. v2ray-plugin, simple-obfs) it spawned has exited. Once no plugin process is alive, all proxied connections will fail, so the balancer aborts loudly instead of failing silently. It indicates the plugin binary keeps dying, usually because of a bad plugin configuration or missing binary.

Source

Thrown at crates/shadowsocks-service/src/local/loadbalancing/ping_balancer.rs:297

                    for plugin in plugins {
                        vfut.push(async move {
                            match plugin.join().await {
                                Ok(status) => {
                                    error!("plugin exited with status: {}", status);
                                    Ok(())
                                }
                                Err(err) => {
                                    error!("plugin exited with error: {}", err);
                                    Err(err)
                                }
                            }
                        });
                    }

                    let _ = future::join_all(vfut).await;

                    panic!("all plugins are exited. all connections may fail, check your configuration");
                });

                Some(plugin_abortable)
            }
        };

        let (best_tcp_idx, best_udp_idx) = PingBalancerBuilder::find_best_idx(&servers, mode);

        let balancer_context = Self {
            servers,
            best_tcp_idx: AtomicUsize::new(best_tcp_idx),
            best_udp_idx: AtomicUsize::new(best_udp_idx),
            context,
            mode,
            max_server_rtt,
            check_interval,
            check_best_interval,
            best_task_notify: Notify::new(),

View on GitHub (pinned to 8eb0f0a65b)

Solutions

1. Fix the plugin binary path and verify it runs standalone with the configured args
2. Correct the `--plugin-opts` value against the plugin's documentation
3. Check plugin stderr logs in the terminal to see why it exits
4. Remove the plugin entry if it is not needed, or pin a working plugin version

Example fix

// before
{"local_address":"127.0.0.1","local_port":1080,"server":"ss.example.com","plugin":"obfs-local","plugin_opts":"obfs=http;obfs-host=wrong-host"}
// after
{"local_address":"127.0.0.1","local_port":1080,"server":"ss.example.com","plugin":"obfs-local","plugin_opts":"obfs=http;obfs-host=real.example.com"}

// before building the balancer, verify the plugin runs:
Command::new(plugin_binary).args(parse_plugin_opts(opts)).status()?.exit_ok()?;

When it happens

Trigger: Panic in `LocalBuilder::new` when building a load-balancing local server with plugin instances: all spawned plugin child processes terminated (plugin_abortable futures all finished) before the balancer can route traffic.

Common situations: Wrong plugin binary path in config so the process exits immediately; invalid plugin options passed to the plugin (e.g. bad TLS args); plugin crashes on startup due to missing libraries or incompatible config; server address/port rejected by the plugin.

Understand the failure class

Background: "Invalid value" and "allowed values are" config errors: what your library rejected and how to fix it — this error's family across 41 libraries.

Related errors

• unsupported syslog facility: {}
• `password` is required for server {svr_addr}
• failed to create ServerConfig, error: {}
• tunnel requires forward address
• missing local_dns_addr

AI-assisted analysis of shadowsocks/shadowsocks-rust@8eb0f0a65b (2026-09-09). Data as JSON: /api/errors/9bf0b26843e577e3. Report an issue: GitHub.