From: Brian Candler <B.Candler@...>
Date: 2003-05-16T20:45:17+09:00
Subject: Re: TCP Sockets

On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 07:53:39PM +0900, Dominik Werder wrote:
> But what should I gonna do if I have to read binary data from one or more 
> connections and want to line them up in packets to send them over a single 
> connection to another host. In this case I can't wait for a newline or EOF 
> cause the binary data may not contain CR/LF.

That would mean mixing the binary streams in a non-deterministic way, which
doesn't sound very useful to me. Half a message from stream A followed by a
quarter message from stream B, followed by...

I think you need to understand the message boundaries within a stream for
this sort of multiplexing to be useful.

> Or if the sending server hangs 
> the connection is established but theres no data flowing.. and so my 
> connection hangs too (forever?)

That's fine, your thread can hang as long as you like, and you can protect
it with a timeout: try

     require 'timeout'
     timeout(5) do
       sleep 10
     end

> How do for example P2P clients do that? One thread per connection?

I don't know what you mean by 'P2P', but a server talking to multiple
clients would indeed normally have a separate thread per client. There's an
example of a fake pop3 server at
http://www.rubygarden.org/ruby?SingletonTutorial
(at the end of section 2)

Regards,

Brian.