We get a pipe broken exception in the Jenkins Unity plugin about 50% of the time. The workspace is cleaned before every build, and compiled assets are fetched from a Unity Cache server running on the same machine.

The error happens ALWAYS at the exact same step:
[...]
Refresh: trashing asset 2197dcffa7f1e4295a0f8e83fed9f5bf
Refresh: trashing asset bca6eeff7c4924a429da9a1b3450b036
Refresh: trashing asset 6b4a9fff255e844c999a4bcd6105d894
Refresh: trashing asset d63cefffccda34624843a84caddbb852
Failure on remote
java.io.IOException: Pipe broken
at java.io.PipedInputStream.read(PipedInputStream.java:322)
at java.io.PipedInputStream.read(PipedInputStream.java:378)
at java.io.InputStream.read(InputStream.java:101)
at org.jenkinsci.plugins.unity3d.io.StreamCopyThread.run(StreamCopyThread.java:64)

When it succeeds, the next line is ALWAYS
Updating Assets - GUID: 00000000000000001000000000000000...
done. [Time: 18.743246 ms]

So IF the build fails, then it is ALWAYS right after the last asset being trashed. If it makes it to the next line (updating asset with GUID 00001000), then the build will ALWAYS succeed.

I think that the frequency of the error is dependent on how large the project is, as we didn't get the error nearly as much in the beginning phases of the project. Now that the project is large we get the pipe broken error about 50% of the time. This is of course conjecture and the frequency of the error could be caused by something else entirely.

Also, errors tend to happen multiple times in a row. Conversely, once it succeeds it tends to succeed for several consecutive builds.

This is of course very much a showstopper for us, so I'd be extremely grateful if someone could have a look at this issue.

Thanks!

• Tommi Kiviniemi
  VP Technology, Co-founder
  Seriously Digital Entertainment Ltd.