Re: Creating a multi-user TCP server

From:
Knute Johnson <nospam@rabbitbrush.frazmtn.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:34:40 -0700
Message-ID:
<47f6bb11$0$6986$b9f67a60@news.newsdemon.com>
jamesgoode wrote:

Hi,

I'm trying to create a multi-user TCP server, without the use of a
thread-per-connection model. My plan is to create an instance of the
ClientConnection class, which is stored in an array, for each
connection. A 'connection listener' thread handles this. The inputs
from the clients are then handled in a loop, which looks like this:

while (true)
        {

            for (int i = 0; i < MAX_CONNECTIONS; i++)
            {
                try {
                    if (connections[i]!=null)
                        if (connections[i].in.ready())
                            connections[i].out.writeBytes(connections[i].in.readLine()+"\n
\r");
                } catch (IOException e) {
                    // TODO Auto-generated catch block
                    connections[i] = null;
                }
            }

        }

(connections[i].in is a BufferedReader)

The problem is, that BufferedReader.ready() always seems to return
true, and that BufferedReader.readLine() halts the program until there
is a line to read.

All help is greatly appreciated.

Many thanks,

--James.


BufferedReader.readLine() blocks until a line terminator is found in the
stream. That is going to be inconvenient for what you have planned. I
think it would be possible to check BufferedReader.ready() in a loop and
read a single char from the stream until ready() returns false, then
move on to your next stream. I don't see anything in the docs that
suggest that ready() will always return true like
InputStream.available() does. One advantage to this method is that it
should scale well with a ThreadPoolExecutor to a lot of connections.

Depending on what sort of latency you can tolerate you might be able to
just block on a read and set a short timeout. Or the other option is to
use NIO and its non-blocking features.

Are you sure that you are going to have so many simultaneous connections
that the thread per connection will be a problem? For a small number of
connections (less than 50 on a Windows machine) it is very easy to code.

--

Knute Johnson
email s/nospam/linux/

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