Recent NVIDIA update causes its agent to probe port 3000!

[joelrb]

Summary

So, yesterday I didn't see this in the terminal when I do npm run dev:

A weird /socket.io 404 request showing up in Next.js dev mode logs,

Ready in 3.3s ○ Compiling /_not-found ... ✓ Compiled /_not-found in 5.5s (1684 modules) 46ms GET /socket.io?X_LOCAL_SECURITY_COOKIE=&EIO=3&transport=polling&t=1744179864858-117 404 in 41ms GET /socket.io?X_LOCAL_SECURITY_COOKIE=&EIO=3&transport=polling&t=1744179869917-118 404 in 40ms GET /socket.io?X_LOCAL_SECURITY_COOKIE=&EIO=3&transport=polling&t=1744179874974-119 404 in 40ms

After adding some logging to middleware.ts, found the culprit:

✓ Starting... ✓ Ready in 2.9s ✓ Compiled /middleware in 287ms (146 modules) 🧨 Incoming /socket.io request! 🧾 Method: GET 🔗 Referrer: null 👤 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/73.0.3683.75 Safari/537.36 NVIDIACEFClient/rel_03_28/9a1bfbe NVIDIAOSCClient/3.28.0.417 NVIDIACEFClient/rel_03_28/9a1bfbe NVIDIAOSCClient/3.28.0.417 🌐 URL: http://localhost:3000/socket.io?X_LOCAL_SECURITY_COOKIE=&EIO=3&transport=polling&t=1744180838098-286

It's from this:

👤 User-Agent: ... Chrome/73.0.3683.75 ... NVIDIACEFClient ... NVIDIAOSCClient/3.28.0.417

This is NVIDIA's CEF (Chromium Embedded Framework) client. It's likely part of:

• GeForce Experience
• NVIDIA ShadowPlay
• NVIDIA Broadcast
• NVIDIA Overlay / In-Game Overlay

These clients embed a browser to interact with localhost ports for overlays, privacy notifications, or performance metrics — and some use socket.io under the hood.

How to Disable or Silence It:
Disable NVIDIA's Overlay

1. Open GeForce Experience
2. Click the ⚙️ Settings icon
3. Toggle In-Game Overlay → OFF
4. Restart your machine (optional but helps fully clear the service)

Middleware.ts

`import { NextResponse } from 'next/server'
import type { NextRequest } from 'next/server'

export function middleware(request: NextRequest) {
const pathname = request.nextUrl.pathname

if (pathname.startsWith('/socket.io')) {
console.log('🧨 Incoming /socket.io request!')
console.log('🧾 Method:', request.method)
console.log('🔗 Referrer:', request.headers.get('referer'))
console.log('👤 User-Agent:', request.headers.get('user-agent'))
console.log('🌐 URL:', request.url)
}

return NextResponse.next()
}

export const config = {
matcher: ['/socket.io'],
}`

Additional information

No response

Example

No response

[icyJoseph]

Good find! You could also I guess, npm run dev -- --port 3004 or which ever port, but interesting that they left this in, at that very port...