How to wakeup Select call without timeout period from another thread - c++

I am searching solution to wake-up select call in c++, As per application requirement i cant set timeout because of multiple thread using select system call.
Please see below scenario.
i want to wakeup select system call waiting on other thread. I tried to write data on the thread from main thread but still it is not able to wakeup it.
I want to close thread and socket if there is empty data on this thread.
It is wakes up select call if socket connection is close from other process, but not working with thread.
Does any one have idea regarding this

On a recent Linux you can use eventfd, on everything in general - a pipe, usage - register one side of the pipe in selector for readability along with actual socket(s), to wake up a selector - just write one byte to the other end of the pipe. Alternatively (if your libc has it) you can use pselect with a sigmask to catch the ALRM signal and raise that signal whenever you need to wake the selector up. Be very careful with using signals approach in a multithreaded application (as "I would not use"), as if not done right a signal may be delivered to a random thread.

Thanks all for valuable suggestion, I am able to resolve the issue with shutdown() call on socket FD using reference answer present on this link, it will pass wakeup signal to select, which is waiting for action. We should close socket only after select call otherwise select will not able to get wake up signal.

Related

How to stop select() immediately on closing the worker thread? [duplicate]

I have a loop which basically calls this every few seconds (after the timeout):
while(true){
if(finished)
return;
switch(select(FD_SETSIZE, &readfds, 0, 0, &tv)){
case SOCKET_ERROR : report bad stuff etc; return;
default : break;
}
// do stuff with the incoming connection
}
So basically for every few seconds (which is specified by tv), it reactivates the listening.
This is run on thread B (not a main thread). There are times when I want to end this acceptor loop immediately from thread A (main thread), but seems like I have to wait until the time interval finishes..
Is there a way to disrupt the select function from another thread so thread B can quit instantly?
The easiest way is probably to use pipe(2) to create a pipe and add the read end to readfds. When the other thread wants to interrupt the select() just write a byte to it, then consume it afterward.
Yes, you create a connected pair of sockets. Then thread B writes to one side of socket and thread A adds the other side socket to select. So once B writes to socket A exits select, do not forget to read this byte from socket.
This is the most standard and common way to interrupt selects.
Notes:
Under Unix, use socketpair to create a pair of sockets, under windows it is little bit tricky but googling for Windows socketpair would give you samples of code.
Can't you just make the timeout sufficiently short (like 10ms or so?).
These "just create a dummy connection"-type solution seem sort of hacked. I personally think that if an application is well designed, concurrent tasks never have to be interrupted forcefully, the just has worker check often enough (this is also a reason why boost.threads do not have a terminate function).
Edit Made this answer CV. It is bad, but it might help other to understand why it is bad, which is explained in the comments.
You can use shutdown(Sock, SHUT_RDWR) call from main thread to come out of waiting select call which will also exit your another thread before the timeout so you don't need to wait till timeout expires.
cheers. :)

WSAEventSelect, one event, multiple sockets

I am rewriting code in my software to support multiple connections, until now, I use select. To get my software more portable I changed to WSAPoll. After finding a bug in WSAPoll which Microsoft will not solve, I want to change to the suggested WSAEventSelect. As WSAWaitForMultipleEvents only support up to 64 Events and for resource saving reasons, I want to connect a hEvent to multiple sockets. My question now is, is
rc = WSAEventSelect(s1, hEventObject1, FD_READ);
rc = WSAEventSelect(s2, hEventObject1, FD_READ);
a legit operation? Please answer only if you have hard facts, not opinions. Or you have used that way yourself before. Also, I do not want to use boost for some reasons (for e.g. 1.52 has a bug in the socket part (funny that is nearly the same bug as WSAPoll)). Also please no "Why don't you..."
A single wait event should not be associated with multiple sockets. Each socket should use it own individual event. Otherwise, if multiple sockets were to use the same event, you would not know which socket satisfied the wait when that event is signaled. Even if you could, there would also be a race condition when WSAEnumNetworkEvents() is called to get the event data, as it resets the event, which might have already been set by another socket. So you could lose events.
To get around the 64-handle limit, do what the WaitForMultipleObjects() documentation says to do:
To wait on more than MAXIMUM_WAIT_OBJECTS handles, use one of the following methods:
• Create a thread to wait on MAXIMUM_WAIT_OBJECTS handles, then wait on that thread plus the other handles. Use this technique to break the handles into groups of MAXIMUM_WAIT_OBJECTS.
• Call RegisterWaitForSingleObject to wait on each handle. A wait thread from the thread pool waits on MAXIMUM_WAIT_OBJECTS registered objects and assigns a worker thread after the object is signaled or the time-out interval expires.
Otherwise, use WSAAsyncSelect() instead, and let it notify you via a window message whenever any given socket satisfies the requested conditions.

Linux: application responsiveness and select()

I have a C++ console app that uses open() [O_RDWR | O_NONBLOCK], write(), select(), read() and close() to work with device file. Also ioctl() can be called to cancel current operation. At any given time only one user can work with device.
I need to come up with C++ class having libsigc++ signals that get fired when data is available from device.
The problem: when calling select() application becomes unresponsive as it waits for the data. How to make it responsive - by calling select() in worker thread? If so - how will worker thread communicate with main thread? Maybe I should look into boost::asio?
How to make it responsive - by calling select() in worker thread
you can use dup(), this will duplicated your file descriptors... thus you can move entire read operations into another thread. thus your write thread and processing thread will be responsive, even when the read [select()] thread is in sleeping.
signal emitting overhead of libsigc++ is minimal, thus i think you can embedded code inside the read thread itself. slots can exist in different thread, this is where you will receive your signals...
I think Thrift source code [entirely boost based] might be of your interest, though thrift does not use libsigc++.
It sounds as though you've misunderstood select; the purpose of select (or poll, epoll, etc) is not "wait for data" but "wait for one or more events to occur on a series of file descriptors or a timer, or a signal to be raised".
What "responsiveness" is going missing while you're in your select call? You said it's a console app so you're not talking about a GUI loop, so presumably it is IO related? If so, then you need to refactor your select so that waiting for the data you're talking about is one element; that is, if you're using select, build FD_SETs of ALL file/socket descriptors (and stdin and stdout are file descriptors) that you want to wait on input for.
Or build a loop that periodically calls "select" with a short timeout to /test/ for any pending input and only try and read it when select tells you there is something to read.
It sounds like you have a producer-consumer style problem. There are various way to implement a solution to this problem, but most folks these days tend to use condition variable based approaches (see this C++11 based example).
There are also a number of design patterns that when implemented can help alleviate your concurrency problem, such as:
Half-Sync / Half-Async
A producer-consumer style pattern that introduces a queue between an asynchronous layer that fills the queue with events, and a synchronous layer that processes those events.
Leader / Followers
Multiple threads take turns handling events
A related discussion is available here.

C++ Win async sockets. Is it possible to interrupt select()

I have a listening thread that waiting for reading on few socket using select and FD_SET. The story is. At some point I will add another socket to the pool and need to abort select and re-initialize FD_SET array fo select. I have an Event to signal pool changes. But how select can react to my Event?
select() at this point of time use timeval with waiting interval of 20 sec and I don't want to changed time to lower value. I don't want frequently re-start select() by timeout...
Is there any way to abort select? What would be the right approach to inform/restart select and force using of new list of socket(at least one socket will be added to pool)
And another question - Msdn says "The select function determines the status of one or more sockets, waiting if necessary, to perform synchronous I/O."
Does that mean that select is not designed to work with sockets that turned to use using async operation?
Use WSAEventSelect() and WSAWaitForMultipleEvents() instead of select(). That way, your pool can create a separate event with WSACreateEvent() and signal it with WSASetEvent() to wake up WSAWaitForMultipleEvents() when needed.
If you want select() to wake up, the easiest way is to send a byte to one of the sockets that select() is waiting on for read access. One way to implement that without affecting functionality of the existing sockets is to create a pair of sockets specifically for that purpose and connect() one to the other.

breaking out from socket select

I have a loop which basically calls this every few seconds (after the timeout):
while(true){
if(finished)
return;
switch(select(FD_SETSIZE, &readfds, 0, 0, &tv)){
case SOCKET_ERROR : report bad stuff etc; return;
default : break;
}
// do stuff with the incoming connection
}
So basically for every few seconds (which is specified by tv), it reactivates the listening.
This is run on thread B (not a main thread). There are times when I want to end this acceptor loop immediately from thread A (main thread), but seems like I have to wait until the time interval finishes..
Is there a way to disrupt the select function from another thread so thread B can quit instantly?
The easiest way is probably to use pipe(2) to create a pipe and add the read end to readfds. When the other thread wants to interrupt the select() just write a byte to it, then consume it afterward.
Yes, you create a connected pair of sockets. Then thread B writes to one side of socket and thread A adds the other side socket to select. So once B writes to socket A exits select, do not forget to read this byte from socket.
This is the most standard and common way to interrupt selects.
Notes:
Under Unix, use socketpair to create a pair of sockets, under windows it is little bit tricky but googling for Windows socketpair would give you samples of code.
Can't you just make the timeout sufficiently short (like 10ms or so?).
These "just create a dummy connection"-type solution seem sort of hacked. I personally think that if an application is well designed, concurrent tasks never have to be interrupted forcefully, the just has worker check often enough (this is also a reason why boost.threads do not have a terminate function).
Edit Made this answer CV. It is bad, but it might help other to understand why it is bad, which is explained in the comments.
You can use shutdown(Sock, SHUT_RDWR) call from main thread to come out of waiting select call which will also exit your another thread before the timeout so you don't need to wait till timeout expires.
cheers. :)