Question

I have a room with 60 computers/devices (40 computers and 20 oscilloscopes Windows CE based) and I would like to know which and every one is alive using ping. First I wrote a standard ping (see here Delphi Indy Ping Error 10040), which is working fine now but takes ages when most computers are offline.

So what I am trying to do is to write a MultiThread Ping but I am quite struggling with it. I have seen only very few examples over the internet and no one was matching my needs, that’s why I try to write it myself.

I use XE2 and Indy 10 and the form is only constitued of a memo and a button.

unit Main;

interface

uses
  Winapi.Windows, System.SysUtils, System.Classes, Vcl.Forms,
  IdIcmpClient, IdGlobal, Vcl.StdCtrls, Vcl.Controls;

type
  TMainForm = class(TForm)
    Memo1: TMemo;
    ButtonStartPing: TButton;
    procedure ButtonStartPingClick(Sender: TObject);
  private
    { Private declarations }
  public
    { Public declarations }
  end;

type
  TMyPingThread = class(TThread)
  private
    fIndex : integer;
    fIdIcmpClient: TIdIcmpClient;
    procedure doOnPingReply;
  protected
    procedure Execute; override;
  public
    constructor Create(index: integer);
  end;

var
  MainForm: TMainForm;
  ThreadCOunt : integer;

implementation

{$R *.dfm}

constructor TMyPingThread.Create(index: integer);
begin
  inherited Create(false);

  fIndex := index;
  fIdIcmpClient := TIdIcmpClient.Create(nil);
  fIdIcmpClient.ReceiveTimeout := 200;
  fIdIcmpClient.PacketSize := 24;
  fIdIcmpClient.Protocol := 1;
  fIdIcmpClient.IPVersion := Id_IPv4;

  //first computer is at adresse 211
  fIdIcmpClient.Host := '128.178.26.'+inttostr(211+index-1);

  self.FreeOnTerminate := true;
end;

procedure TMyPingThread.doOnPingReply;
begin
  MainForm.Memo1.lines.add(inttostr(findex)+' '+fIdIcmpClient.ReplyStatus.Msg);
  dec(ThreadCount);

  if ThreadCount = 0 then
    MainForm.Memo1.lines.add('--- End ---');
end;

procedure TMyPingThread.Execute;
begin
  inherited;

  try
    fIdIcmpClient.Ping('',findex);
  except
  end;

  while not Terminated do
  begin
    if fIdIcmpClient.ReplyStatus.SequenceId = findex then Terminate;
  end;

  Synchronize(doOnPingReply);
  fIdIcmpClient.Free;
end;

procedure TMainForm.ButtonStartPingClick(Sender: TObject);
var
  i: integer;
  myPing : TMyPingThread;
begin
  Memo1.Lines.Clear;

  ThreadCount := 0;
  for i := 1 to 40 do
  begin
    inc(ThreadCount);
    myPing := TMyPingThread.Create(i);
    //sleep(10);
  end;
end;

end.

My problem is that it “seems” to work when I uncomment the “sleep(10)”, and “seems” not to be working without it. This for sure means I am missing a point in the threading I have written.

In other words. When Sleep(10) is in the code. Every time I clicked the button to get to check the connections the result was correct.

Without the sleep(10), it is working “most” of the time but some times the result is wrong giving me a ping echo on offline computers and no ping echo on online computer, as is the ping reply was not assigned to the correct thread.

Any comment or help is welcome.

—– EDIT / IMPORTANT —–

As a general follow up of this question, @Darian Miller started a Google Code project here https://code.google.com/p/delphi-stackoverflow/ which is a working basis. I mark his answer as the “accepted answer” but users should refer to this open source project (all the credit belongs to him) as it will surely be extended and updated in the future.

Answer 1

Remy explained the problems… I’ve wanted to do this in Indy for a while so I posted a possible solution that I just put together to a new Google Code project instead of having a long comment here. It’s a first-stab sort of thing, let me know if you have some changes to integrate:
https://code.google.com/p/delphi-vault/

This code has two ways to Ping…multi-threaded clients as in your example, or with a simple callback procedure. Written for Indy10 and later versions of Delphi.

Your code would end up using a TThreadedPing descendant defining a SynchronizedResponse method:

  TMyPingThread = class(TThreadedPing)
  protected
    procedure SynchronizedResponse(const ReplyStatus:TReplyStatus); override;
  end;

And to fire off some client threads, the code becomes something like:

procedure TfrmThreadedPingSample.butStartPingClick(Sender: TObject);
begin
  TMyPingThread.Create('www.google.com');
  TMyPingThread.Create('127.0.0.1');
  TMyPingThread.Create('www.shouldnotresolvetoanythingatall.com');
  TMyPingThread.Create('127.0.0.1');
  TMyPingThread.Create('www.microsoft.com');
  TMyPingThread.Create('127.0.0.1');
end;

The threaded response is called in a synchronized method:

procedure TMyPingThread.SynchronizedResponse(const ReplyStatus:TReplyStatus);
begin
  frmThreadedPingSample.Memo1.Lines.Add(TPingClient.FormatStandardResponse(ReplyStatus));
end;