Do I have to close a connection created with NSURLSessionDataTask - swift

I've just developed a library in Swift which is posting data to a specific server. I open the connection with NSURLSession.sharedSession().dataTaskWithRequest(request). Now I was wondering if I have to handle the closing of this connection or does the task close the connection itself after some time?

NSURLSession and NSURLConnection both use a shared connection pool, reusing existing connections for future requests to reduce overhead, and periodically closing old connections that are no longer in use. So no, there's nothing you have to do to ensure that connections get closed.

Related

golang grpc socket tuning

I have a golang client application talking a server via GRPC. I noticed that while the application is running that the number of sockets accumulated on the client app keeps climbing till around 9000. At which point I pause client. However, after there are no more traffic between the client and the server the number sockets still stayed at that level even after 8 hours.
Is there anyway we can tune GRPC for socket usage? Such as closing sockets after a timeout? Is using streaming another way to limit number of sockets being opened?
Thanks for any help.
I'd start by making sure that your client application cleans up unused connections (grpc.ClientConn) by calling Close() method on it.
Also, since I don't know what exactly your application does so I'm gonna go ahead and suggest reusing connections for multiple RPCs (you're probably already doing this).
And to answer your question about setting timeout deadline on connections:
1. You shouldn't have to do this. Feel free to open up an issue on https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go about whatever gRPC shortcoming is forcing you to take this route.
2. But if you must know, you can use a custom dialer(https://github.com/grpc/grpc-go/blob/13975c070286c7371aa3a8b3c230e90d7bf029fc/clientconn.go#L333) and set a deadline on the net.Conn that you return from it.
Best,
Mak

Does winsock api multithread automatically?

I am wring a small http server which is using the Microsoft Windows WinSock API.
Do I need to apply multithreaded logic when handling multiple users?
Currently Windows sends a message when there is a network event and each message
carried (in wParam) the socket to be used in either send() or recv().
When client A connects and requests a couple of files usually a number of socket
are created by Winsock. My server then get a message that "send this file to
socket 123" and later "send that file to socket 456"
When another client connect it too gets a few sockets, say 789 and 654.
My server then respond to requests to send data using supplied socket number. It
does not have to know who wants the file since the correct file has to be sent to
the right socket.
I do not know whether Windows itself uses multiple threads when handling
accepting connection and sending the message down to my program.
So my question is:
Do I need to apply multithreaded logic when handling multiple users? And if so at
what point should I create a thread?
You typically use a thread per socket. And if you are accepting connections, a thread in a loop to block, waiting for an incoming connection socket. You then create a new thread and pass this socket handle to the new thread to handle. When that connection is closed and done with, simply let that thread terminate (or join). This is the basis of a threaded server.
in psudo code...
loop {
socket = accept();
new ThreadHandler( socket )
}
Using a single thread to handle multiple sockets is tricky, mainly because the thread can block (stop, waiting) while its writing, or more often, reading from a socket. It's not for the faint hearted.
For most applications, there is no point in using multiple threads to handle network connections. I've made a small writeup in an answer to this question.
Multiple threads become useful when handling the received data requires an unpredictable amount of CPU time, for example in database servers, or when the program structure does not allow for requests to be handled asynchronously.
There is also a third option, the "worker pool". A single thread handles all incoming connections and deserializes incoming requests, and then passes off work items to a pool of threads that handle one item at a time.
This way, simply opening a connection does not yet consume the resources needed for an entire thread, and system load is implicitly limited by the number of threads in the pool.

memcached client: opening, closing and reusing connections

I have been testing spymemcached and xmemcached clients. I have been trying to find answers in the projects documentation but it is very poor.
My questions are regarding opening, closing and reusing the connections. I found this in one document:
A client may just close the connection at any moment it no longer needs it. Note,
however, that clients are encouraged to cache their connections rather
than reopen them every time they need to store or retrieve data. Caching connections will eliminate the overhead associated with establishing a TCP connection".
Spymemcached doesn't provide a connection pool, so every time I create a MemcachedClient instance I am creating a new connection right? Then when should I close the connection? Should I provide the same instance to all the threads in my application or create a new one every time?
xmemcached does have a connection pool. In this case should I close connections I get from the pool?
Spymemcached doesn't provide a connection pool, so every time I create a MemcachedClient instance I am creating a new connection right?
Yes, every time you create a new MemcachedClient object you create a new connection. Each connection appear asynchronous to the application so even having one connection will probably be enough for your application. Some people do however build a connection pool of MemcachedClients though.
Then when should I close the connection?
You shut down connections as soon as you no longer need to communicate with memcached. If you application is short lived you need to shutdown the connection in order to get the jvm to stop since MemcachedClient connections are daemon connections by default.
Should I provide the same instance to all the threads in my application or create a new one every time?
Use the same connection with multiple threads. Creating a new connection for each call will cause a significant performance drop because of the overhead of creating a TCP connection.
xmemcached does have a connection pool. In this case should I close connections I get from the pool?
I'm not familiar with xmemcached, but I would imagine you would only want to create a few (16 maybe) threads and share them with your application threads for the best performance.

TCP connection management

I have this question asked in the Go mailing list, but I think it is more general to get better response from SO.
When work with Java/.Net platform, I never had to manage database connection manually as the drivers handle it. Now, when try to connect to a no sql db with very basic driver support, it is my responsibility to manage the connection. The driver let connect, close, reconnect to a tcp port, but not sure how should i manage it (see the link). Do i have to create a new connection for each db request? can I use other 3rd party connection pooling libraries?
thanks.
I don't know enough about MongoDB to answer this question directly, but do you know how MongoDB handles requests over TCP? For example, one problem with a single TCP connection can be that the db will handle each request serially, potentially causing high latency even though it may be bottlenecking on a single machine and could handle a higher capacity.
Are the machines all running on a local network? If so, the cost of opening a new connection won't be too high, and might even be insignificant from a performance perspective regardless.
My two cents: Do one TCP connection per request and just profile it and see what happens. It is very easy to add pooling later if you're DoSing yourself, but it may never be a problem. That'll work right now, and you won't have to mess around with a third party library that may cause more problems than it solves.
Also, TCP programming is really easy. Don't be intimidated by it, detecting a closed socket, and reconnecting synchronously or asynchronously is simple.
Most mongodb drivers (clients) will create and use a connection pool when connecting to the server. Each socket (connection) can do one operation at a time at the server; because of how data is read off the socket you can issue many requests and server will just get them one after another and return data as each one completes.
There is a Go mongo db driver but it doesn't seem to do connection pooling. http://github.com/mikejs/gomongo
In addition to the answers here: if you find you do need to do some kind of connection pooling redis.go is a decent example of a database driver that pools connections. Specifically, look at the Client.popCon and Client.pushCon methods in the source.

SSL socket connection on iPhone

Is there a way to reuse SSL socket connections on the iPhone. I'm seeing an extra 3-4 second overhead in doing SSL handshaking. I'm using NSURLconnection currently to do the API calls and each one of them is taking 4-5 seconds on Wifi. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
Are you asking how to "reuse" sockets for the same specific address and port? Or for different URLs?
If the former, just don't close the socket until you're absolutely sure you don't need it anymore.
If the latter, there's nothing you can do about that. The SSL certificate verification process is likely where you're getting the overhead from.
You'll need to add more context to your question if you want a more specific answer.
you might want to establish an SSL connection an keep reusing it. Rather than make a new connection each time. There is definitely an overhead to SSL connections as well as handshaking. You cant get rid of the overhead from the encryption but the handshaking can be reduced by using NSStreams and keeping the connection open as you use it.
I have posted code and instructions on how to do it here:
NSStream SSL on used socket