Question

I have an application that is going to work like a p2p-software where all peer are going to talk to each other. Since the communication will be TCP i thought that I could use epool(4) so that multiple connections can be handled. Since each peer will send data very often, I thought that I will establish a persistent connection to each peer that will be used under the applications lifetime.

Now, one thing that I don’t know how to handle is that since the connection is never closed how do I know when i should stop receiving data with read() and call epool_wait() again to listen after more packages? Or is there a better way of dealing with persistent TCP connections?

Answer 1

You should set the socket to non-blocking, and when epoll indicates there is data to read
you should call read() in a loop until read() returns -1 and errno is EWOULDBLOCK

That is, your read loop could look sometihng like:

for(;;)
  ssize_t ret;
  ret = read(...);
  if(ret == 0) {
     //client disconnected, handle it, remove the fd from the epoll set
      break;
  } else if(ret == -1) {
     if(errno == EWOULDBLOCK) {
        // no more data, return to epoll loop
      } else {
        //error occured, handle it remove the fd from the epoll set
      }
      break;
  }

 // handle the read data 
}

If you’re not using edge triggered mode with epoll, you don’t really need the loop – you could get away with doing just 1 read and return to the epoll loop. But handle the return values just like the above code.