Re: Winsock select timeout

From:

"Scott McPhillips [MVP]" <org-dot-mvps-at-scottmcp>

Newsgroups:

microsoft.public.vc.language

Date:

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 10:40:49 -0400

Message-ID:

<eUdsRvMEIHA.3848@TK2MSFTNGP05.phx.gbl>

<vanisathish@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1192630618.951354.298320@e34g2000pro.googlegroups.com...

Hi,

i'm communicating with more than 40 serial devices connected thru' an
serial hub. the pc has to communicate thru' UDP to the serial hub.

since the response is quite sensitve, ( the application has to timeout
within 100msec) we are using "select" call with timeout.

There are around 100 threads that are parallely polling all the 40
devices on the serial hub.

I noticed that the select call is timingout i.e. returning 0
eventhough there is socket in the buffer..does this mean that the
timer got expired when that thread is in the sleep state (i.e. some
other thread is running) and later when the thread resumes, it is just
returning the previous state...

I'm running this application on a 2.66G Pentium PC..will the context
switching be an issue at all here. i dont see this problem if the
number of threads is reduced...,meaning less context switching.

thanks

It is hard to be sure without understanding more about your program, but the
thread switching period is probably 20 milliseconds. So if you have 100
threads it could be as long as 2000 msec before each one gets a turn. So of
course a 100 msec timeout seems likely to fail. The fact that the problem
seems to go away with fewer threads supports this theory. This sounds like
a serious design scalability problem.

Since all the UDP messages come from the same place they must be sequential,
and you could consider a design that uses only one thread to process all UDP
input.

--
Scott McPhillips [VC++ MVP]