Server thoughts using Asnyc vs Sync sockets

Lee Trueman

Hi all,
just thought id ask you guys for your thoughts on something i'm looking into doing.

Basically looking to develop a Server that will accept TCP connections. The clients will not be connected constantly, i.e the clients open connection, send data to the server, the server will send back ack, nak or some data and then the client closes.

The amount of clients the server will have to service will be around 1000-2000, but i would like the confidence of knowing it would work with more :-).

The connections from the clients will be totally random with regards to time thus, in theory there is a possibility that the server could get hit with 100s of requests at any instance in time.

So my question is what do you guys think the best route to take is for the server side sockets is ? Async ? Sync ?

Also another thing i should mention is the data the server receives will need to be pushed into a SQL database.

Look forward to any comments you have :-)

9 Replies

Know the answer? Post it — somebody with the same question will find it here.

Sam Hobbs14y ago
Accepted answer
You will get a similar response wherever you go. Most developers that are most qualified to help will not respond. It is most likely that the people you will get a response from are not adequately qualified to help but you won't know that they are not adequately qualified. Most developers that are most qualified to help would say that you need to do some reading. There are ample resources to help you.
Sam Hobbs14y ago
Are you talking about the answer that suggested that you use threads instead of asynchronous IO? I think you are correct that "spawning of a new thread per connection" is not efficient. I hope that SAKryukov is correct and that hundreds of threads is more efficient but I am nearly certain that it is not. I think that networking experts will say that multiple threads is good but only a limited number of threads that are in a thread pool.
Lee Trueman14y ago
good to see community spirit is still strong, asked the same questions on codeproject and got good relevant answers plus there's a larger array of examples a support for us novices
Lee Trueman14y ago
well 90 view and only Sam responded. May be my question is beyond people in here, will go ask else where........
Sam Hobbs14y ago
Thank you for the clarification. Note that your question says "your thoughts" so I thought the discussion was open to suggestions such as I provided. I was trying to eliminate the other possibilities. If you had clarified the question in the manner you now have then that would have saved time.
Lee Trueman14y ago
Hi Sam,
the client devices are little embedded micros, running a lightweight TCP/IP stack to enable TCP socket connectivity, thus we don't need/want the bloat of HTTP/HTTPS. I understand what you are saying, using a web-server and then using POST methods to send the data. But the HTTP is just waisted overhead that we don't need.

All i want to know is what is the prefered direction for server socket comms for this type of application ?
Sam Hobbs14y ago
If security is an issue then the https protocol is designed to solve that problem.
Lee Trueman14y ago
Hi Sam
yes both ends will be development by us. The connection is using TCP sockets. There will be a low level binary protocol involved in the exchange between the clients and server. Data packets will be small, couple of hundred bytes max. There will be no use of web technologies i.e HTML or ASP, this needs to be a secure closed system, the data over TCP sockets will also be encrypted.
Sam Hobbs14y ago
There are a few critical issues that are not clear. Will you be developing both the client and the server? How will the connection be made? Will the client exist in a HTML page or an ASP page or what? Is it possible for your server to instad be a web service? I think you should also look at articles about WCF.