Nonblocking Tcp server
c#, nonblocking, sockets, tcp
Solution
Take a look at the TcpListener class first. It has a BeginAccept method that will not block, and will call one of your functions when someone connects.
Also take a look at the Socket class and its `Begin` methods. These work the same way. One of your functions (a `callback function`) is called whenever a certain event fires, then you get to handle that event. All the `Begin` methods are asynchronous, so they will not block and they shouldn't use 100% CPU either. Basically you want BeginReceive for reading and BeginSend for writing I believe.
You can find more on google by searching for these methods and async sockets tutorials. Here's how to implement a TCP client this way for example. It works basically the same way even for your server.
This way you don't need any infinite looping, it's all event-driven.
Problem
It's not a question really, i'm just looking for some guidelines :) I'm currently writing some abstract tcp server which should use as low number of threads as it can. Currently it works this way. I have a thread doing listening and some worker threads. Listener thread is just sits and wait for clients to connect I expect to have a single listener thread per server instance. Worker threads are doing all read/write/processing job on clients socket. So my problem is in building efficient worker process. And I came to some problem I can't really solve yet. Worker code is something like that(code is really simple just to show a place where i have my problem): ``` List<Socket> readSockets = new List<Socket>(); List<Socket> writeSockets = new List<Socket>(); List<Socket> errorSockets = new List<Socket>(); while( true ){ Socket.Select( readSockets, writeSockets, errorSockets, 10 ); foreach( readSocket in readSockets ){ // do reading here } foreach( writeSocket in writeSockets ){ // do writing here } // POINT2 and here's the problem i will describe below } ``` it works all smothly accept for 100% CPU utilization because of while loop being cycling all over again, if I have my clients doing send->receive->disconnect routine it's not that painful, but if I try to keep alive doing send->receive->send->receive all over again it really eats up all CPU. So my first idea was to put a sleep there, I check if all sockets have their data send and then putting Thread.Sleep in POINT2 just for 10ms, but this 10ms later on produces a huge delay of that 10ms when I want to receive next command from client socket.. For example if I don't try to "keep alive" commands are being executed within 10-15ms and with keep alive it becomes worse by atleast 10ms :( Maybe it's just a poor architecture? What can be done so my processor won't get 100% utilization and my server to react on something appear in client socket as soon as possible? Maybe somebody can point a good example of nonblocking server and architecture it should maintain?