Nine Hard-Learned Lessons From Building a WebRTC SFU Server in Go
A developer building a low-latency WebRTC selective forwarding unit (SFU) in Go documented nine non-obvious failures encountered beyond basic tutorial examples. Key issues included a breaking API change in Pion v4 that removed TrackRemote.WriteRTCP, requiring RTCP writes to be routed through the PeerConnection with corrected SSRCs. Other problems ranged from a silent UI bug where an empty event.streams array caused a black video element despite healthy network stats, to browser heuristic caching serving outdated JavaScript and masking applied fixes. Payload type mismatches between publisher and viewer PeerConnections caused Chrome to silently drop packets, since RTP payload type numbers are negotiated per-connection and cannot be forwarded blindly. The author notes that most of these failures superficially resemble media or network problems, making them especially time-consuming to diagnose without knowing their true causes.
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