From: Dominik Werder <dwerder@...>
Date: 2003-05-16T22:26:59+09:00
Subject: Re: TCP Sockets

> That would mean mixing the binary streams in a non-deterministic way, 
> which
> I think you need to understand the message boundaries within a stream for
> this sort of multiplexing to be useful.
Of course I'll take some data from Stream "1" and create a packet like 
this: "Here we go with xx bytes from stream 1" and send this through my 
"tunnel"-connection.
The problem: My program does not know about the underlaying protocol of the 
stream. So if I receive 99 bytes from that stream, and these 99 bytes are a 
request of any protocol and my task is to only forward this packet through 
the tunnel, then I can hardly wait for, say, 100 bytes are available 
because I did a read(100) and my process blocks until 100 bytes are 
available :)
Sorry for my english, was not the best at school :)

> 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
Thanks, I'll dig into this :)


>> 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)
I mean peer-to-peer, like filesharing clients. They got many concurrently 
connections..

thanks!
Dominik