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sunnybrad

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Thread Model for Interactive server

Hi:

I was creating a deamon...It is going to be multi-threaded.....I wanted to validate a thread model for it.

After accepting a socket connecting

client_socket = accept(server_socket,&addr,&len);

I create a sessionhandler which will process the incoming data, My session handler is created with incoming with socket created by accept call:

sessionhandler = new sessionhandler(client_socket);

Then I create a thread....

hThread = CreateThread(
                  NULL,                        
                  0,                            
                  Connection,                  
                  (void *)sessionhandler,                
                  0,                           /
                                );  

Now connection function processes incoming packets.....
Connection function has the following code fragment...........

while(len=recv(sessionhandler->Connection,buf,sizeof(buf),0))
      {
            if(-1==sessionhandler->Process(buf,len))
            {
                              
            }
                  }      
      
Is this Thread model fine....for medium scale bursty processing of max 100 to 200 clients at peak simultaneously......

Each user access his own resource but there might be more than one session per user.....

Here is the code flow:  

A processing class gets created for each connection......

A thread also get created with each connection......

This thread is associated with a particular class handle....which is not unique in code....

Thread is associated with particular object and connection function. connection function is in server-main.cpp processing class/object is separate.

Will there be unique processing object for each socket connection and thread created....

Please let me know if this would work. If you could suggest improvements it is fine.....

If you suggest a better thread model it is also fine....

I am using g++ compiler on Ubuntu platform and POSIX thread library....

Look forward to your responses.....

Best Regards,

-Sunnybrad
Avatar of Infinity08
Infinity08
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I'd improve your approach by using a worker thread pool, rather than creating a new thread for every connection. You'll avoid quite a bit of thread creation overhead that way.

Other than that, what you describe is a pretty standard approach to writing a server.
Avatar of sunnybrad
sunnybrad

ASKER

Hi Infinity08:

There is authentication required so I guess I have to maintain one thread per one client connection.

How can I create a worker thread pool todo this......

Worker thread pool does not know anything about client authentication details....

If I can do this via a worker thread pool please explain with a small code fragment.

Thanks

-Sunnybrad
A thread pool is simply a system that manages threads. You request a thread from it, and it will return you one that is available (unused), or if none are available, it creates a new thread and returns that. You can then let the thread do some work, and when the work is done, the thread becomes available again in the thread pool. A subsequent request can then re-use that same thread without having to start a new one.

The kind of work you do in the thread is unimportant to the thread pool. So, you can do authentication, or anything else you need.

I recommend you read up on the concept of thread pools - here eg. : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thread_pool_pattern

And then you can look for a specific thread pool implementation that suits your needs, or roll your own.


An alternative approach could be to use boost asio (http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/release/doc/html/boost_asio.html) ... Have a look at that if you like the idea :)
Hi Infinity08:

I like the idea of thread pool and will try it out..

As for Boost....I guess it has libraries to do things....I had two question regarding that.....

Does using Boost have licensing implementation.....for commercial products....

As compared to elementally developing using some other thread libraries in Linux environment will using boost increase final package size etc....

Thanks for all your responses....really helpful....

-Sunnybrad
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Infinity08
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