Question

I am just trying to implement a simple web server in C++. For that depending on the request the web server fetches data from server. For that I am using

int main()
{
std::ifstream file("/home/chaitanya/cpp/net/hello");
int length;
char *buffer;

if(file.is_open())
{
    std::cout << "File is open\n";

    file.seekg(0, std::ios::end);
    length = file.tellg();      
    file.seekg(0, std::ios::beg);

    buffer = new char[length];

    file.read(buffer, length);
    file.close();   
}   

printf("Data:\n\n%s\n", buffer);
delete[] buffer;

return 0;
}

This working fine for small files. Even i am sending the whole file data irrespective of its size thru the socket. Is it a better approach ?

For instance, if file size is huge ? I guess it would be better to send a specific chunk of data at a time.

Can u guys plz suggest as to which approach would be good (or) any other better/faster approaches used by web servers ?

Thanks in advance. 🙂

Answer 1

Almost in every OS you have a better OS dependent option for sending a file over a socket, for example in linux you have sendfile, in Windows you have TransmitFile and …, but if you want to have a simple portable solution, I will derive a class from std::ostream that send data to the socket and then use this:

my_socket_stream s;
s << file.rdbuf() << std::flush;

using this technique I can send multi giga byte files without any problem!