The Tcp server need to serve many clients, If one client one server port and one server thread to listen the port, I want to know weather it is faster ?
If one port is good, could someone explain the different between one port and multiple ports in this case, thanks!
The problem with using multiple ports to achieve this is that each of your clients will each have a specific port number. Depending on the number of clients there could be a tremendous amount of bookkeeping involved.
Typically, for a tcp server that is to serve multiple clients, you have a "main" thread which listens to a port and accepts connections on that port. That thread then passes the connected socket off to another thread for processing and goes back to listening.
For a wealth of Unix network programming knowledge check out "The Stevens Book"
Generally speaking* the server will allocate it's own outgoing sockets for each connected client (and you don't need to be aware of those numbers). Each client connection handle will hold it's port references.
When defining the servers connection port, you will allocate a socket for incoming clients to connect to. There is no performance benefit using multiple sockets, in fact allocating additional sockets will show a performance hit (although for each port it will be tiny.)
update...
By the way, assigning multiple incoming ports (particularly a large range) for clients to connect to is also insane. From the perspective of making the service usable and maintainable.
Related
There's already a question How exactly does a remote program like team viewer work which gives a basic description, but I'm interested in how the comms works once the client has registered with the server. If the client is behind a NAT then it won't have its own IP address so how can the server (or another client) send a message to it? Or does the client just keep polling the server to see if its got any requests?
Are there any open source equivalents of LogMeIn or TeamViewer?
The simplest and most reliable way (although not always the most efficient) is to have each client make an outgoing TCP connection to a well-known server somewhere and keep that connection open. As long as the TCP connection is open, data can pass over that TCP connection in either direction at any time. It appears that both LogMeIn and TeamViewer use this method, at least as a fall-back. The main drawbacks for this technique are that all data has to pass through a TeamViewer/LogMeIn company server (which can become a bottleneck), and that TCP doesn't handle dropped packets very well -- it will stall and wait for the dropped packets to be resent, rather than giving up on them and sending newer data instead.
The other technique that they can sometimes use (in order to get better performance) is UDP hole-punching. That technique relies on the fact that many firewalls will accept incoming UDP packets from remote hosts that the firewalled-host has recently sent an outgoing UDP packet to. Given that, the TeamViewer/LogMeIn company's server can tell both clients to send an outgoing packet to the IP address of the other client's firewall, and after that (hopefully) each firewall will accept UDP packets from the other client's Internet-facing IP address. This doesn't always work, though, since different firewalls work in different ways and may not include the aforementioned UDP-allowing logic.
Firstly, please excuse my probable butchering the technical terminology. I've been thrown into socket IO with little formal education and I know that I am bungling words left and right.
I'm trying to build a client and server in C that enables multiple clients to connect to one another. The general procedure goes something like this:
1) Server has one port that is constantly listening and accepting connections
2) A client connects on that port
3) Server creates a new socket (same address, different port number), tells the client to connect to that socket, and closes the connection with the client.
4) The client connects to the designated socket and provides the server with a channel it would like to be on
5) Server places that socket on the designated channel
6) Repeat steps 2 through 5 for each client that connects to the server
/* all of the above has been coded already */
7) Once a channel has 2 or more members, I'd like to have each member port be able to broadcast to all other ports in the same channel (and thus the clients communicate with each other)
In this situation, all involved sockets on the same channel have the same address and DIFFERENT port numbers. Everything I've read and researched about broadcasting and multicasting revolves around each communicator having the same port number and different addresses.
Is there a way to do the communication that I'm hoping to do, in C?
I would think you want to use the listen() and accept() functions for TCP. You can do what you describe and have clients talk to each other, but all traffic will run through the server as a hub.
If you want all clients to be able to talk to every other client, you have a few options:
Server is the hub for all data and passes it between clients for you
Clients maintain direct connections to the other clients and pass data to each other in order to facilitate the hub. This means lots of data copying.
Broadcast or multicast (UDP). This is only possible over a local network, as internet routers will block multicast and broadcast traffic.
I would probably go with #1.
Remember that each client has it's own IP address, so for a client to communicate with another client, and not involving the server, it would need to open a new connection with the other client, send data and then close the connection. While doable, I do not think this idea would scale very well.
I do agree with Syplex that having the server act as a relay hub is probably the best, and certainly has the potential to scale well. So the data-flow would be something like this:
a client receives a message that is to be retransmitted to all the other clients.
this message is passed to all other instances of your server process
each of these instances of your server process sends out the message.
The issue becomes how you are implementing you server, and you do have two models that fit what you describe:
(1) you are using a multi-treaded server, in which each new connection causes a thread to be spawned to handle the communication between the client and the server.
(2) you are using a forking server, in which the server forks a new process to communicate with the client.
In case (1) you would be interested in intra-process communication (message queue for example) while in case (2) you would be interested in inter-process communication (named pipes or shared memory for example).
At this point there are two many variables to give a concise answer. I hope this helps gets you started and at least gives you somewhere to start looking.
I have a single client that is trying to connect to my main server using socket s1. The client needs to keep trying to connect to main server with s1, but at the same time connect and keep sending "trying" messages to my secondary server. Is it a good idea to create 2 sockets,reuse port and create 2 binds for those 2 sockets or there are better ways to achieve this? This is a client side and using C sockets. Thanks.
If your program is a client to multiple servers, use one socket per server. You don't need bind for a client socket at all, just connect.
I think you are using TCP socket( aren't you?). So one socket for connection is needed.
Then reuse port is not so important because your application is a client application, which is the part the start the connection. Any outbound port should be ok.
Because you can only call connect(2) once per stream-oriented socket, you really must use at least two sockets to make two simultaneous connections (or connection attempts).
You don't need to bind(2) anything on client ports, except in strange cases. (I'm thinking of the Sun RPC portmapper daemon, but thankfully it's been nearly a decade since I've cared about the portmapper daemon. Also rlogin needed to bind(2) as a client when using the host-authentication method, which was horrible.)
I am coding for a server-client programming in C using socket API where I am trying to send control information to client for using different TCP connection.
Whenever the server has created new socket(TCP), I want it to notify the client to use the new socket for further communication.Currently I have thought of sending UDP packet to the client to be notified. Once the client receives the packet, it sends back the ACK to the server and at the same time switches to the another TCP connection.
I want to know, is there a better to communicate the control data across the network besides using UDP as it is unreliable.Thnx
I would like elaborate on what I am trying to achieve. I am going to measure the parameters like bandwidth,latency, receive window etc. as metric for a Ipv4 and IPv6 TCP connection. Based on the observed performance I will be switching between the two protocols whoever provides better performance.Once the decision is made to switch , I have to notify the partner(may be client or server based on type of bandwidth I am measuring upload, download). I start with IPv4 connection and at the same time open another connection - IPv6 for measuring the bandwidth and latency.
If the IPv6 connection provides better performance, I need to tell the client to switch to IPv6. In this case both the connections are open for monitoring the bandwidth periodically to decide on switching. So I have two queries on this aspect. 1.Is it a good idea to keep two connections at a time.I can create the other connection only when I need to measure the metric as the path followed between two machines will hardly change.If yes, I can pass the control information using the other TCP connection to tell the client to switch. In this way I can also measure the bandwidth and notify client
It it is not a good idea two have two TCP connections, I can use UDP to send the control information. I am avoiding to send control information on the conn used to transfer actual data as it will be an overhead. My code will work like a middleware for transfer the data, where the application will call my functions/macros to transfer the data, and the internal code will take care of measuring the bandwidth and decision to switch.I hope I am clear on what I want achieve. Thank for your feedback in advance
The normal sequence of operations for a server-side listening TCP socket is:
int fd1 = socket(...); // Create socket - assuming TCP, not UDP
bind(fd1, ...); // Bind it to a local address
listen(fd1, ...); // Set it in listen mode
int fd2;
while ((fd2 = accept(fd1, ...)) != -1) // Accept an incoming connection
{
...communicate with client via fd2...
close(fd2); // When finished
}
close(fd1);
Now, at the point when you get fd2, that has a socket with a different local ephemeral port from the port that fd1 is connected to (correction per EJP). There is no need to communicate any specific information back to the client; the TCP/IP implementation deals with that for you. The client will have a socket that is connected to fd2, with a port (probably an ephemeral port) on its machine connected to the server and the server's ephemeral port.
The point is that the completed connection will have a unique 4-tuple of (client IP address, client port, server IP address, server port).
When it comes to the processing, there are various ways of dealing with it. You can use an iterative server which deals with one request before dealing with any others. Or you can create a concurrent server in either of two different ways. One way is with a threaded server where a thread (from a pool, or newly created for each incoming connection) deals with the new request while the main thread goes back to accept new incoming requests. The alternative is that you create a forking server where the main server process forks and the child process deals with the new connection while the parent process closes the connection and goes back to listening for the next connection request.
Let me explain my scenario before asking the question.
I am in creation phase of 17 different multiplayer games that can be played online, directly from browser.
To accomplish this, I have choosed Silverlight.
Communication will be done using Sockets.
Image 17 different type of games like Chess, Backgammon, Pool and hundred of online users communicating between client app and server app using Sockets binded to the same PORT number.
Wouldn't be faster (for my server) if every different type of game will use another PORT number ? Chess will use 4502, Backgammon will use 4503, Pool 4504.
Will this make a difference ? Or should I use the same PORT number 4502 for all games with no fear that something bad can happen ?
A socket that has been established as a server can accept connection requests from multiple clients. The original server socket does not become part of the connection. The accept method makes a new socket which participates in the connection and returns this socket. The server's original socket remains available for listening for further connection requests.
So it has no advantage to use different server ports. After all web servers get all their requests on port 80 and handle this very well.
As far as speed of processing on your server goes it will most likely make very little difference whether you receive all your communications on one socket or 17. The one socket approach would be a tiny bit faster since your server application will probably have fewer threads to switch between. However there will be other things that will have a higher overhead such as actually processing the game moves or authorising client requests etc.
As for the question of whether to use one or multiple sockets the bigest thing you should think about is deployment constraints. The TCP port numbers that Silverlight is allowed to use a non-standard (i.e not 80 or 443) and if there is a firewall or proxy between your client and server you may be better sticking to a single port to make the access control list on the firewall simpler.