currently I have a server and a client console application in c++ using winsock. In my situation the client is able to send a message to the server, which listens and it can aswer, but I need to make them to be able to always recieve and send messages to one another.
My problem is I can not use threads, I need to achieve this goal without them. How can this be done by sockets and loops? Any hint is welcome.
Thank you
If you cannot use threads, you have to do send and recv in the same loop. Rather than doing it blindly it's better to use select function to check whether is there any incoming massages from any of the sockets or is it possible to write (send) data in to the socket. This is a reference to study about select function.
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I want to create a chat program between a server and a client, I want the client or server to be able to send message to the other end at anytime without waiting for example:
Client: hi
Server: hi
Server: I'm the server.
Server: How are you?
Client: Good.
In this example the Server doesn't wait for the Client to reply and sends another message at anytime.
Should I use the function select?, If so how should I determine the timeout and is the timeout value is the solution for busy waiting?
Is select function is the best approach for this problem?
Thanks.
Using select seems like the right approach, especially if you want the program to work on Windows. This will allow you to block the process and wait for a message from multiple clients simultaneously.
In general you should set the timeout to NULL so that the server will block indefinitely for a request from a client. The timeout is only useful if you want to additionally wake up the server at regular intervals for other reasons.
If you are targetting Unices (like Linux) it is easier and more efficient to use poll. This does basically the same thing but the interface is easier to work with. select becomes quite awkward to use if the file descriptor numbers become larger than 1024, which is a problem if you ever expect your server to handle large numbers of clients.
If you are targeting Linux specifically and don't care about portability you can even use epoll which has even more performance advantages and is arguably easier to use.
If you are only targeting Windows, you can create event objects for each of the sockets and then use WaitForMultipleObjectsEx to wait for data from any of them. This provides similar functionality to poll but the API is quite involved.
This question is not for a concrete implementation of how this is done. It is more about the concept and design of sending information over Internet with some kind of protocol - either TCP or UDP. I know only that sockets are needed, but I am wondering about the rest. For example after a connection is made and you send the information through that, but how does the other end listen for a specific port and does it listen constantly?
Is listening done in a background thread waiting for information to be received? (In order to be able to do other things/processing while waiting for information)
So in essence, I think a real world example of how such an application works on a high level would be enough to explain the data flow. For example sending files in Skype or something similar.
P.S. Most other questions on similar topics are about a concrete implementation or a bug that someone has.
What I currently do in an application is the following using POSIX sockets with the TCP Protocol:
Most important thing is: The most function are blocking functions. So when you tell your server to wait for client connection, the function will block until a connection is established (if you need a server that handles multiple clients at once, you need to use threading!)
Server listens for specific port until a client connects. After the connect, you will get a new socket file descriptor to communicate with the client whilst the initial socket can listen to new connections. My server then creats a new thread to handle that client whilst waiting for new connections on the initial socket. In the new thread the server waits for a request command from the Client (e.g. Request Login Token). After a request was received by the server, the server will gather its informations, packs it together using Googles Protocol Buffers and sends it to the client. The client now either tells the server to terminate the session (if every data is received by the client that it needs) or send another request.
Thats basically the idea in my server. The bigger problem is the way you transmit and receive data. E.g. you cant send structs or classes (at least not via C++) over the wire, you need some kind of serializer and you have to make sure the other part knows how much to receive. So what i do is, first send a 4byte integer over the wire containing the size of the incomming package, then send the package itself using a serializer (in my case Googles Protocol buffers). The other side waits for 4 byte to be available, knowing that this will be the size of the incomming package. After 4 bytes are received, the program waits for exact that amount of data being available on the socket, when available, read the data out of the buffer and deserialize it. When the socket is not receiving data for 30 seconds, trigger a timeout and terminate the connection.
What you always need to be aware of is the endianess of the systems. E.g. a big endian system (e.g. PowerPC) and a little endian system (e.g. x86) will have problems when you send an integer directly over the wire. For example a
0001
on the x86, is a
1000
on the Power PC, thus making a 8 out of a 1. So you should always use functions like ntohl, an htonl, which will convert data from and to host byte order from and to network byte order (network byte order is always big endian).
Hope this kind of helps. I could also provide some code to you if that would help.
Let's say, I have a server with many connected clients via TCP, i have a socket for every client and i have a sending and receiving thread for every client. Is it safe and possible to call send function at the same time as it will not call send function for same socket.
If it's safe and ok, Can i stream data to clients simultaneously without blocking send function for other clients ?
Thank you very much for answers.
Yes it is possible and thread-safe. You could have tested it, or worked out for yourself that IS, IIS, SQL Server etc. wouldn't work very well if it wasn't.
Assuming this is Windows from the tag of "Winsock".
This design (having a send/receive thread for every single connected client), overall, is not going to scale. Hopefully you are aware of that and you know that you have an extremely limited number of clients (even then, I wouldn't write it this way).
You don't need to have a thread pair for every single client.
You can serve tons of clients with a single thread using non-blocking IO and read/write ready notifications (either with select() or one of the varieties of Overlapped IO such as completion routines or completion ports). If you use completion ports you can set a pool of threads to handle socket IO and queue the work for your own worker thread or threads/threadpool.
Yes, you can send and receive to many sockets at once from different threads; but you shouldn't need those extra threads because you shouldn't be making blocking calls to send/recv at all. When you make a non-blocking call the amount that could be written immediately is written and the function returns, you then note how much was sent and ask for notification when the socket is next writable.
I think you might want to consider a different approach as this isn't simple stuff; if you're using .Net you might get by with building this with TcpListener or HttpListener (both of which use completion ports for you), though be aware that you can't easily disable Nagle's algorithm with those so if you need interactivity (think of the auto-complete on Google's search page) then you probably won't get the performance you want.
I want to capture and save the data that's being sent to a certain process through internet .
Are there any tools for the job?
If not, does listening to the same port as the process that I'm trying to get data from, will get me the data?
Any help appreciated !
You can try Wireshark: http://www.wireshark.org/
Or RawCap: http://www.netresec.com/?page=RawCap
I don't know what is the data format you are trying to capture. I used these two tools to capture xml data from web service.
On Windows, use Winsock Packet Editor (WPE). You will be able to hook a process' all Winsock-related functions and capture (and even modify/block) any TCP/IP, UDP packets that the application receives or sends. For all other operating systems, you will have to either:
write your own tool that hooks various socket functions (e.g. send, recv, etc.)
or just use Wireshark which will capture all Layer-3 packets that goes through your network card. You will have to use your own knowledge of the application that you're trying to monitor in order to filter the packets that are specific to the application.
Are there any tools for the job?
Wireshark. But what have you tried?
If not, does listening to the same port as the process that i'm trying to get data from, will get me the data?
Not if you don't forward the traffic to the real destination, otherwise the other party will be waiting forever on a response, or simply timeout and close the connection. You should create something like a proxy.
Wireshark is easier.
Nginx uses epoll, or other multiplexing techniques(select) for its handling multiple clients, i.e it does not spawn a new thread for every request unlike apache.
I tried to replicate the same in my own test program using select. I could accept connections from multiple client by creating a non-blocking socket and using select to decide which client to serve. My program would simply echo their data back to them .It works fine for small data transfers (some bytes per client)
The problem occurs when I need to send a large file over a connection to the client. Since i have only one thread to serve all client till the time I am finished reading the file and writing it over to the socket i cannot resume serving other client.
Is there a known solution to this problem, or is it best to create a thread for every such request ?
When using select you should not send the whole file at once. If you e.g. are using sendfile to do this it will block until the whole file has been sent. Instead use a small buffer, and send a little data at a time to each client. Then use select to identify when the socket is again ready to be written to and send some more until all data has been sent. This will allow you to handle multiple clients in parallel.
The simplest approach is to create a thread per request, but it's certainly not the most scalable approach. I think at this time basically all high-performance web servers use various asynchronous approaches built on things like epoll (Linux), kqueue (BSD), or IOCP (Windows).
Since you don't provide any information about your performance requirements, and since all the non-threaded approaches require restructuring your application to use these often-complex asynchronous techniques (as described in the C10K article and others found from there), for now your best bet is just to use the threaded approach.
Please update your question with concrete requirements for performance and other relevant data if you need more.
For background this may be useful reading http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html
I think you are using your callback to handle a single connection. This is not how it was designed. Your callback has to handle the whatever-thousand of connections you are planning to serve, i.e from the number of file descriptor you get as parameter, you have to know (by reading the global variables) what to do with that client, either read() or send() or ... whatever