I have a program (process) which needs to listen on 3 ports… Two are TCP and the other UDP.
The two TCP ports are going to be receiving large amounts of data every so often (could be as little as every 5 minutes or as often as every 20 seconds). The third (UDP) port is receiving constant data. Now, does it make sense to have these listening on different threads?
For instance, when I receive a large amount of data from one of the TCP ports, I don’t want my UDP stream interrupted… are these common concerns for network programming?
I’ll be using the Boost library on Windows if that has any bearing.
I’m just looking for some thoughts/ideas/guidance on this issue and how to manage multiple connections.
In general, avoid threads unless necessary. On a modern machine you will get better performance by using a single thread and using I/O readiness/completion features. On Windows this is IO Completion Ports, on Mac OS X and FreeBSD: kqueue(2), on Solaris: Event ports, on Linux epoll, on VMS QIO. Etc.
In boost, this is abstracted by boost::asio.
The place where threads would be useful is where you must do significant processing or perform a blocking operating system call that would add unacceptable latency to the rest of the networking processing.