How do I get an entire response from a socket?
We are using the .net system.net.sockets.socket class for some ftp functionality.
After sending a command on an open socket we call the socket.receive (buffer). This puts a certain number of bytes into the buffer and returns the number of bytes.
The problem is that sometimes the operation returns 0 but we have not received the entire response. The next call to the receive method will then return the remaining message from this command PLUS the response generated by the subsequent command.
We suspect this happens due to network latency and varying ftp server loads etc.
My question is how can we reliably know when we have read back the entire outstanding response from the socket?
After sending a command on an open socket we call the socket.receive (buffer). This puts a certain number of bytes into the buffer and returns the number of bytes.
The problem is that sometimes the operation returns 0 but we have not received the entire response. The next call to the receive method will then return the remaining message from this command PLUS the response generated by the subsequent command.
We suspect this happens due to network latency and varying ftp server loads etc.
My question is how can we reliably know when we have read back the entire outstanding response from the socket?
JuanCarniglia
When using the FTP protocol, you receive messages (Acknowledgments) that signal whether the server has finished uploading the file or not. You have to handle some sort of protocol.
If you know how much to read, insert that as buffer size even if your buffer is bigger to only read the remaining bytes.
ASKER
Juan - the problem is in knowing that I have received the entire message back from the server via the socket.
Werrock - I am doing this already.
The problem is that I submit a command and then call the Receive method on the socket with a buffer of e.g. 512 bytes and the method returns say 200 bytes. Receiving less than the buffer size back normally indicates that all data has been received. However, when we submit the next command and issue another Receive, the first part of the response is the remainder from the previous command. The problem seems to be related to server speed. Our only workaround to date is putting in thread sleeps to allow the server time to send its response but this obviously slows the component down.
We have tried using the Available property on the .Net socket but this suffers from the same problem - if the server is slow to respond, the socket does not know that a response is coming.
I was hoping that there was some reliable End-of-message marker that we could look for.
Werrock - I am doing this already.
The problem is that I submit a command and then call the Receive method on the socket with a buffer of e.g. 512 bytes and the method returns say 200 bytes. Receiving less than the buffer size back normally indicates that all data has been received. However, when we submit the next command and issue another Receive, the first part of the response is the remainder from the previous command. The problem seems to be related to server speed. Our only workaround to date is putting in thread sleeps to allow the server time to send its response but this obviously slows the component down.
We have tried using the Available property on the .Net socket but this suffers from the same problem - if the server is slow to respond, the socket does not know that a response is coming.
I was hoping that there was some reliable End-of-message marker that we could look for.
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
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