Socket available data for read - c++

I need fast method for check socket has available data for read.
I use select(), but it is not fast.
Is faster method exists?

select() tends to degrade for large sets of sockets due to the need to rebuild the fd_set, and the way it gives results.
The epoll() API on Linux is perhaps my favourite method of dealing with multiple sockets. You might take a quick look into it, but it is not available on Windows.
I believe the only way around select()'s limitations on Windows with that many sockets is to use IO-completion ports.

You need to use completion ports on Windows. There are many online articles on how to use them.

Related

Handling more than 1024 sockets?

I'm working on a MMO game server project and I have a problem. That's select() method's limit. I want to handle more than 1024 socket I/O with a single thread. I want to make this with single thread because I've tried to make a multi-thread handling system. That system creates 3 thread (for example in 4 cores processor; 1 is main, 3 is select() handlers) that handles select() method but there is an other problem again, now our limit is gone to 3072 (1024 * 3) and that isn't a solution! After that idea, I want to make a non-blocking socket system, with this system I've called 2 different select method in 1 single thread like this; "select() select()". They returns in order and I can handle them in order. But there is an other problem I think. If I want to implement a thread like "while(true){ select() select()}" and select() methods (non-blocking) retuns, I'll overload CPU like a empty "while(true)" block. If I want to make a select() timeout, I can't handle bottom select() in realtime. Now I can't make a algorithm for that. Can anybody help me about this?
NOTE: I don't want to use poll-epoll-wsapoll etc. (poll cannot handle microseconds, it isn't fast as select!) and libevent like 3rd party libraries (I want to make my own!)
FINALLY SOLUTION (I think): I don't need to handle nanoseconds for a I/O operation because there is no sense to handle it. Poll is a good way to handle more than 1024 socket I/O. I'll research something for understanding MMO systems. And the last one is I'll make some tests and I'll try somethings before I ask a question :) Thanks!
EDIT: I'm new in this Q&A platform. Can you tell me what's wrong with my question after giving a negative point? :)
Using select is fundamentally wrong with this many (thousands) of connections. While select is usually faster when you have only a very small number of sockets (maybe tens,) it scales horribly to several thousand and more. Everywhere that I know of, select slows down linearly with the number of connections (it's even worse than that, but I wouldn't go into the details.)
Even poll doesn't do much better than select at scaling to thousands of connections. It doesn't have select's (low) limit on the number of file descriptors you can poll, but it still scales linearly with the number of connections.
What you really should use are platform-specific facilities like epoll and kqueue. They scale extremely better (usually O(1),) but obviously they aren't portable.
I seriously suggest that you consider something like libev that is a portable, highly-tested and a thin wrapper around platform-specific facilities and services.
This is because platform-specific methods (e.g. select, poll, epoll, kqueue, I/O completion ports, event ports, etc.) are different form each other and none of them is available on more than one or two platforms, or their limits and the details of their behaviors differ slightly. These facilities might even change from one version of an OS to the next (e.g. epoll on Linux 2.6.9, IIRC.)
Even if you are not concerned with portability or future-proofing your code, such a library can provide you with more functionality and a nicer interface.
Two more libraries you can try are libevent (a little larger and slower, but more features) and libuv (if you need Windows portability.)
Given the requirements you have set, your problem has no solution.
The normal way to overcome select()'s limit of FD_SETSIZZE (1024) file descriptors is to use poll() (or even better alternatives epoll and kqueue) but you've rejected that option.
Otherwise, you could always overcome the problem by calling select() multiple times in parallel in different threads with different sets of file descriptors... but you've rejected that option too.
I don't believe there can really be any other solution!
Perhaps you should explain why both the poll() et al option and the thread option are not suitable. Your requirements seem like artificial limitations without justification.

Regarding handling more than 1024 socket descriptors

I have written a chat server using C on Linux. I have tested the same and it works fine with respect to performance. The only thing which lags is that I am using select system call for handling of sockets descriptors. Since select has the limit of 1024 so at max my chat server can handle only 1024 users concurrently.
I know that the other option which I can use is poll, but not so sure about it and its performance as compared to select.
Please suggest me the most effective way by which I can resolve this situation.
poll() can be used as an almost drop-in replacement for select(), and will allow you to exceed 1024 file descriptors (you can make make the array passed to poll() as large as you want).
It will have similar performance characteristics to select(), since both require the kernel and userspace application to scan the entire array - but if select() is working OK for you, then poll() should too. (There is actually a slight performance improvement in poll() - the .events field, specifying the events you are interested in for each file descriptor, is not changed by poll(), so you don't have to rebuild the array before every call like you do with the file descriptor sets passed to select()).
If you later find yourself having performance problems caused by scanning the poll file descriptor array, you can consider switching to the epoll interface, which is more complicated but also scales better with very large numbers of file descriptors.
Your question is known as the C10K problem (how to deal with more than 10 thousands simultaneous connections). You'll find lot of resources on the web, e.g. this one.
And you should consider select as an obsolete system call. Even with only dozens of file descriptors, you should at least prefer poll
Notice that Qt and Gtk provide you with an event loop machinery, often using poll (and QtCore or Glib can be used outside of graphical interfaces). There is also libev and libevent. I suggest using one of them.
Linux has no 1024 limit on select(). But:
select() performance is very poor
FreeBSD does :)
Your can use poll(). But its performance suffers when number of active connections increases.
Using epoll() is preferable on Linux however I would suggest to use libevent
libevent is fast, clean and portable way to implement heavy loaded servers and for linux it has epoll under the hood.

select() max sockets

Just more asynchronous stuff!
Alright, so I now have a working asynchronous socket program for my main chatting application, and it's working really well! However I have one concern..
While using select() what is the maximum number of file descriptors that I can use in each set? I've read about a limit of 1024...
If that limit is indeed hard coded and I can't FD_SETSIZE the limit any higher, should I spawn another thread once I reach that limit? Or something else? Is this even a concern?
Yes, the FD_SETSIZE has a limit of 1024. You can easily check that by looking at the select.h header. People have tried to increase the limit, but the reports vary from "working" to "crashing" after a while. If you need that many connections, use poll instead.
A very good article to read.
If you are programming under a Posix compliant system, you should be able to use the poll() function instead of select() and this will do away with the limit that you mention. Alternatively, you can call select() multiple times in succession but be certain to use a relatively short timeout.
For really large numbers of sockets look into using a library like libevent.
The library can abstract several OS-specific advanced features like /dev/poll, kqueue, epoll, and event ports. With these you can handle really vast numbers of connections.
You don't say what OS you're using, but for most, if you want to use file descriptors above 1024 with select, you can #define FD_SETSIZE to be a larger number BEFORE #including sys/socket.h. Unfortunately, this doesn't work on Linux.

Most suitable asynchronous socket model for an instant messenger client?

I'm working on an instant messenger client in C++ (Win32) and I'm experimenting with different asynchronous socket models. So far I've been using WSAAsyncSelect for receiving notifications via my main window. However, I've been experiencing some unexpected results with Winsock spawning additionally 5-6 threads (in addition to the initial thread created when calling WSAAsyncSelect) for one single socket.
I have plans to revamp the client to support additional protocols via DLL:s, and I'm afraid that my current solution won't be suitable based on my experiences with WSAAsyncSelect in addition to me being negative towards mixing network with UI code (in the message loop).
I'm looking for advice on what a suitable asynchronous socket model could be for a multi-protocol IM client which needs to be able to handle roughly 10-20+ connections (depending on amount of protocols and protocol design etc.), while not using an excessive amount of threads -- I am very interested in performance and keeping the resource usage down.
I've been looking on IO Completion Ports, but from what I've gathered, it seems overkill. I'd very much appreciate some input on what a suitable socket solution could be!
Thanks in advance! :-)
There are four basic ways to handle multiple concurrent sockets.
Multiplexing, that is using select() to poll the sockets.
AsyncSelect which is basically what you're doing with WSAAsyncSelect.
Worker Threads, creating a single thread for each connection.
IO Completion Ports, or IOCP. dp mentions them above, but basically they are an OS specific way to handle asynchronous I/O, which has very good performance, but it is a little more confusing.
Which you choose often depends on where you plan to go. If you plan to port the application to other platforms, you may want to choose #1 or #3, since select is not terribly different from other models used on other OS's, and most other OS's also have the concept of threads (though they may operate differently). IOCP is typically windows specific (although Linux now has some async I/O functions as well).
If your app is Windows only, then you basically want to choose the best model for what you're doing. This would likely be either #3 or #4. #4 is the most efficient, as it calls back into your application (similar, but with better peformance and fewer issues to WSAsyncSelect).
The big thing you have to deal with when using threads (either IOCP or WorkerThreads) is marshaling the data back to a thread that can update the UI, since you can't call UI functions on worker threads. Ultimately, this will involve some messaging back and forth in most cases.
If you were developing this in Managed code, i'd tell you to look at Jeffrey Richter's AysncEnumerator, but you've chose C++ which has it's pros and cons. Lots of people have written various network libraries for C++, maybe you should spend some time researching some of them.
consider to use the ASIO library you can find in boost (www.boost.org).
Just use synchronous models. Modern operating systems handle multiple threads quite well. Async IO is really needed in rare situations, mostly on servers.
In some ways IO Completion Ports (IOCP) are overkill but to be honest I find the model for asynchronous sockets easier to use than the alternatives (select, non-blocking sockets, Overlapped IO, etc.).
The IOCP API could be clearer but once you get past it it's actually easier to use I think. Back when, the biggest obstacle was platform support (it needed an NT based OS -- i.e., Windows 9x did not support IOCP). With that restriction long gone, I'd consider it.
If you do decide to use IOCP (which, IMHO, is the best option if you're writing for Windows) then I've got some free code available which takes away a lot of the work that you need to do.
Latest version of the code and links to the original articles are available from here.
And my views on how my framework compares to Boost::ASIO can be found here: http://www.lenholgate.com/blog/2008/09/how-does-the-socket-server-framework-compare-to-boostasio.html.

Cross-platform (linux/Win32) nonblocking C++ IO on stdin/stdout/stderr

I'm trying to find the best solution for nonblocking IO via stdin/stdout with the following characteristics:
As long as there is enough data, read in n-sized chunks.
If there's not enough data, read in a partial chunk.
If there is no data available, block until there is some (even though it may be smaller than n).
The goal is to allow efficient transfer for large datasets while processing 'control' codes immediately (instead of having them linger in some partially-filled buffer somewhere).
I know I can achieve this by using threads and a istream::get() loop, or by writing a bunch of platform-specific code (since you can't select() on file handles in windows)... ((There is also istream::readsome() which seems promising, but the only results I can find on google were of people saying it doesn't actually work well.))
Since I haven't done much coding w/ these APIs, perhaps there is a better way.
Maybe boost::asio can be of use for you?
I used the threads and platform specific code. See my answer to another question. I was able to put the OS-specific stuff in inputAvailable() (Linux uses select, Windows just returns true). I could then use WaitForSingleObject() with a timeout on Windows to try to let the thread complete, then TerminateThread() to kill it. Very ugly, but the team didn't want to use this bit of boost.
I did something similar to jwhitlock ... I ended up with a StdinDataIO class that wraps around the appropriate OS-specific implementation(*) so that the rest of my program can select() on the file descriptor StdinDataIO provides, remaining blissfully ignorant of Windows' limitations regarding stdin. Have a look here and here if you like, the code is all open-source/BSD-licensed.
(*) the implementation is a simple pass-through for Linux/MacOSX, and in Windows it's a rather complex process of setting up a child thread to read from stdin and send the data it receives over a socket back to the main thread... not very elegant, but it works.