IPC between service and Layered Service Provider - winsock

There are a lot of methods to do IPC between a service and LSP(winsock hook DLL).
But which is the most effective one? Named pipe, COM server, Shared memory, etc.
Any clue or tip will be appreciated.

That depends on what you are after ? Speed. If soo
http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/14740/Fast-IPC-Communication-Using-Shared-Memory-and-Int
Winsocks might be slower.

Related

Can a process be both service provider and client on D-Bus

I know typically a process is either a service provider or client over D-Bus, is it practically possible that a process be both a service and client (I think it's okay)? I have such needs in my project, originally there is a service provider and client, some requirements come in, I need the original client to provide service as well. Is there any downside if it's theoretically doable?
Yes, it’s possible, straightforward to do, and there are no downsides as long as it’s a suitable architecture for the problem you’re trying to solve.
Many system services already do just this: they expose a system service on the bus, and also act as a client with other system services which provide information to them.

Why bother with service discovery when message oriented middleware does the job?

I get the problem that etcd/consul/$whatever are trying to solve. Service consumers need to talk to service providers, a hugely fluid distributed system needs a mechanism to marry the two.
However, the problem of "where do service consumers go with their requests?" is old and IMO has been solved with MOM -- message oriented middleware.
In MOM, the idea is that service consumers do not care where the service providers live. They simply send a message and have the messaging bus take care of routing the message to the appropriate consumer. There can be multiple providers all doing the same thing (queue-based round-robin) or versioned providers (/v1/request goes to one, /v2/request goes to another).
This is a simple, powerful integration pattern that completely decouples a service interface from its implementation.
And yet I see this bizarre obsession with discovering service providers, which appears to create tight coupling between consumers and providers (in addition to a few other anti-patterns as well.)
So, what am I missing here? TIA.
In MOM, everything flows through the bus, so it might become a bottleneck. With service discovery, a consumer looks up a producer "once" (ok it might have to check back again after a while), and then "directly" (ok could be through a proxy) talks to it.
Or if you prefer catchy phrases: smart endpoints & dumb pipes vs (i guess) dumb endpoints & smart pipes.
Personally I don't see the two as either or for this type of architecture. You could use the service discovery to see what services are available at the moment and subscribe to the MOM for the events you then know will be there. If you can't find services you depend on you can raise an alert. Not all MOM's let you know when there is no publisher for a channel.
You can also combine them in the way that the service discovery is where you find the services you want to contact directly, for example a data store that does no job, and still use the MOM to subscribe to events for changes that other systems do. Not all use cases fit well with job queuing either, as some tasks must be solved synchronously, and then the service discovery is a great way to have a dynamic environment.
I do prefer the asynchronous MQ myself, and I think that if you do it right, with load balancing, redundancy, clustering with separate readers and writers etc you can easily have great stability, scalability and a standardized way for all your components to communicate.

Is there a kind of "Socket connection pool" in nodejs?

In order to avoid the time spent on the creation of the sockets.
My node server need some "long connection"(TCP Socket) to keep communicating with the server written in C which runs in the background, and all the 'http request' could share the TCP sockets in the pool.
I wonder if there is a kind of socket pool implementation in nodejs? (something like the database connection pool)
Any help will be appreciated !
generic pool is a good one. https://github.com/coopernurse/node-pool
But as for http, there's built-in pooling mechanism .
Take a look at the official documentation for http.Agent; that's what (behind the scenes for most node developers) handles allocation of available sockets.

How to Monitor Sockets activity in a computer?

I want to write a program from scratch to see the sockets activity, what they send, what they receive, etc. I don't want to use a Library because it's more for academic purposes than anything else.
Where should I start?
Just to be clear: my program won't be connecting to anything or creating any socket, it just wants to listen to the activity in a computer.
Any thoughts (in any OS) about where to start will be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Take a look at libpcap/WinPcap.
You are out of luck as far as portability goes.
Although the application APIs are the same or similar for UNIX and Windows, and, both implementations are historically based on the same Berkeley Sockets BSD code, the operating system architecture and hence the ways you access low level OS functions such as network IO are completely different.
Linux has a number of 'network sniffing' tools(tcpdump, ethereal etc.) easily available. Not so sure about windows, MS provides a Network Monitor and there are some tools available -- Google 'Sysinternals TDImon' for the MS tools.

Is there any benefit to using windows winsock API functions compared to BSD-style socket functions?

Is there any benefit on Windows to use the WSA winsock functions compared to the BSD-style ones?
The most significant difference is the availability of Asynchronous Event style APIs in Winsock.
With Berkeley sockets, each time you read or write your application will "block" until the network is ready, which could make your application unresponsive (unless the network I/O is handled in a different thread).
With an async interface, you can arrange for a callback function to be called as part of the normal windows message loop each time data is received or when the transmit buffer is empty.
Only if you plan to deploy to a legacy platform like Windows 95 or there is something in the winsock API that you absolutely cannot live without and you don't want to roll yourself (<-- doubtful tho).
If you design around the BSD paradigm, your code can work on other platforms with less porting work. If you assume that your network library will support asynchronous I/O (as Alnitak mentions), you're going to have to do a lot more work if that gets pulled out from under you.
Of course, if you're sure you'll never leave the warm bosom of Microsoft, feel free to go to town.
With respect to Alnitak's answer, I agree - I'd just add that you need not use a message loop to use asynch operations on sockets. Using I/O completion ports is a very scalable way to build a high-performance networked application.