I've got server running in background and a program which should display data from server. I want to somehow launch method in my program from server. So server should be a sender, but how to do it ?
There is no reason why a server can't also be a client, just implement the interfaces from both sides and you're good.
The main thing to worry about is deadlocking: if you have a single threaded program which is waiting for the reply of the server, then it will not handle the request that the server sends, so the server is stuck and will not send a reply to the program.
This can be solved by starting the server implementations on different threads and letting them not block on the client thread.
Even better is to avoid having a server send back requests before sending replies, but cascading requests (forward requests to more specialized servers) should be no problem.
Related
I am using thrift to provide an interface between a device and a management console. It is possible for there to be up to 4 active connections to the device at one time, and I have this working using a TThreadPool server.
The issue arises around client disconnections; If a client disconnects correctly, there is no issue, however if one does not (i.e. the client crashes out or doesn't call client->close()) then the server seems to keep that clients thread alive. This means that when the next connection attempt is made, the client hangs, as the server has used up its allocated thread pool so cannot service the new request.
I haven't been able to find any standard, public mechanism by which the server can stop, and hence free up, a clients thread if that client has not used the interface for a set time period?
Is there a standard way to facilitate this in thrift?
Set the receive/send timeout on the server socket might help. Server will close the connection on timeout.
https://github.com/apache/thrift/blob/129f332d72facda5d06f87e2b4e5e08bea0b6b44/lib/cpp/src/thrift/transport/TServerSocket.h#L103
void setSendTimeout(int sendTimeout);
void setRecvTimeout(int recvTimeout);
I am pretty new to socket programming - so this might be a simple question but I'd really like to clarify.
I have a multiple-client to single server program: the individual clients send messages to the server which processes them, and then passes it on the destination i.e. the server is an intermediary.
On the server side, there is one thread for each client which is meant to 'listen' for messages from the clients (which will be placed in a buffer). At the moment all the clients are sending messages to the same port (as far as I can tell).
I am thinking of setting up another thread on which the server will process the messages before transmitting them on. Does it make sense to use another port on the server to send those messages?
I don't mean this to be a discussion, but I don't know what is common or more logical to do - any advice?
On the client-side, I am planning for it to have one thread for sending messages to the server, and another thread for receiving. Please let me know if any other information is required!
edit
At the moment it is a 1-server-to-multiple(tens now, hundreds later)-client program - I seem to have problems with the client receiving messages from my server (I am troubleshooting so I thought that using the same ports might be the problem), but I will try it with the same ports again and see. I thought it might be a matter of the receiving port being too busy to send messages as well.
At the moment all the clients are sending messages to the same port (as far as I can tell).
What do you mean 'as far as I can tell'? You must know whether you are opening more than one port at the server.
Does it make sense to use another port on the server to send those messages?
No it doesn't. If you're using TCP, send the messages back down the same socket. If you're using UDP you don't need more than one UDP socket, and it simplifies the client and the application protocol if replies come from the same ip:port the request was sent from.
I am writing a client-server application using sockets in C++.
The protocol for communications is essentially:
The client connects to the server.
The client "sends" an ASCII command to the server.
The server executes the command remotely, and gets the results, and sends the results back to the client.
the results can be multiple megabytes of data. Once all the results are sent to the client, I would like the server to signal the client that it's done.
Is the best way to closesocket(), or should it send a message that indicates to the client that there are no more results, and the client can decide whether to close the socket or not? The drawback with closing the socket is that the client will need to establish a new connection if it wants to execute another command, but the drawback of sending a message back from the server is that the client needs to scan every recv to determine if the results are done.
Which is the best practice?
I would take a slightly lateral approach:
Client sends command to server
Server send size of response and then the real response
Client can issue new command / close connection
In this way the client knows how much to read and can decide whether to close the connection or not.
I am writing a proxy server that proxies SSL connections, and it is all working perfectly fine for normal traffic. However when there is a large file transfer (Anything over 20KB) like an email attachment, then the connection is reset on the TCP level before the file is finished being written. I am using non-blocking IO, and am spawning a thread for each specific connection.
When a connection comes in I do the following:
Spawn a thread
Connect to the client (unencrypted) and read the connect request (all other requests are ignored)
Create a secure connection (SSL using openssl api) to the server
Tell the client that we contacted the server (unencrypted)
Create secure connection to client, and start proxying data between the two using a select loop to determine when reading and writing can occur
Once the underlying sockets are closed, or there is an error, the connection is closed, and thread is terminated.
Like I said, this works great for normal sized data (regular webpages, and other things) but fails as soon as a file is too large with either an error code (depending on the webapp being used) or a Error: Connection Interrupted.
I have no idea what is causing the connection to close, whether it's something TCP, HTTP, or SSL specific, and I can't find any information on it at all. In some browsers it will start to work if I put a sleep statement immediately after the SSL_write, but this seems to cause other issues in other browsers. The sleep doesn't have to be long, really just a delay. I currently have it set to 4ms per write, and 2ms per read, and this fixes it completely in older firefox, chrome with HTTP uploads, and opera.
Any leads would be appreciated, and let me know if you need any more information. Thanks in advanced!
-Sam
If the web-app thinks an uploaded file is too large what does it do? If it's entitled to just close the connection, that will cause an ECONN at the sender: 'connection reset'. Whatever it does, as you're writing a proxy, and assuming there are no bugs in your code that are causing this, your mission is to mirror whatever happens to your upstream connection back down the downstream connection. In this case the answer is to just do what you're doing: close the upstream and downstream sockets. If you got an incoming close_notify from the server, do an orderly SSL close to the client; if you got ECONN, just close the client socket directly, bypassing SSL.
I am writing a server in linux that is supposed to serve an API.
Initially, I wanted to make it Multi-threaded on a single port, meaning that I'd have multiple threads working on various request received on a single port.
One of my friends told me that it not the way it is supposed to work. He told me that when a request is received, I first have to follow a Handshake procedure, create a thread that is listening to some other port dedicated to the request and then redirect the requested client to the new port.
Theoretically, it's very interesting but I could not find any information on how to implement the handshake and do the redirection. Can someone help?
If I'm not wrong in interpreting your responses, once I create a multithreaded server with a main thread listening to a port, and creates a new thread to handle requests, I'm essentially making it multithreaded on a single port?
Consider the scenario where I get a large number of requests every second. Isn't it true that every request on the port should now wait for the "current" request to complete? If not, how would the communication still be done: Say a browser sends a request, so the thread handling this has to first listen to the port, block it, process it, respond and then unblock it.
By this, eventhough I'm having "multithreads" , all I'm using is one single thread at a time apart from the main thread because the port is being blocked.
What your friend told you is similar to passive FTP - a client tells the server that it needs a connection, the server sends back the port number and the client creates a data connection to that port.
But all you wanted to do is a multithreaded server. All you need is one server socket listening and accepting connections on a given port. As soon as the automatic TCP handshake is finished, you'll get a new socket from the accept function - that socket will be used for communication with the client that has just connected. So now you only have to create a new thread, passing that client socket to the thread function. In your server thread, you will then call accept again in order to accept another connection.
TCP/IP does the handshake, if you can't think of any reason to do a handshake than your application does not demand it.
An example of an application specific handshake could be for user authentication.
What your colleague is suggesting sounds like the way FTP works. This is not a good thing to do -- the internet these days is more or less used for protocols which use a single port, and having a command port is bad. One of the reasons is because statefull firewalls aren't designed for multi-port applications; they have to be extended for each individual application that does things this way.
Look at ASIO's tutorial on async TCP. There one part accept connections on TCP and spawns handlers that each communicate with a single client. That's how TCP-servers usually work (including HTTP/web, the most common tcp protocol.)
You may disregard the asynchronous stuff of ASIO if you're set on creating a thread per connection. It doesn't apply to your question. (Going fully async and have one worker-thread per core is nice, but it might not integrate well with the rest of your environment.)