Question

I have the idea to dev a gaming server (not a mmo server, but a server that can handle many game instance, like many chess party at the same times)

I was guessing that it could be interesting to manage (for the server) a client repartition on many socket at a time. So is there an interest to do this ?

For Example:

5 game instance on port 1234
5 game instance on port 1235
etc …

I was thinking about firewall. A firewall will do its job faster on huge traffic on the same port or it could be faster to treat small traffic on many port ? and so on can this behavior could be change on different firewall ? (iptables, other ?)

Can we optimize the bandwith by separate the traffic in multiple socket ? or It doesn’t matter and put all the traffic in same socket do the same result ?

Do you think multiport network can give a better latency for the client ?

A security gain? if a issue, not one that could give a root access, is find on a server the hacker could cheat with only few people because the traffic is cloisonned on many different socket?

Do you think it’s could bring something that I don’t think (not difficulty of programming of course) ?

Thanks you for your response.

Answer 1

Separating a traffic does not necessarily improve the performance of the network handling. Just because you’re allocating more network resources, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to improve the overall performance because you’ll most likely end up with bottleneck problem. You could have multiple ports but still have performance issue if you only use single thread, and conversely have single port and have really good proven performance if you use multiple threads(e.g. thread pool) for that socket( using epoll, kqueue, IOCP etc ). It all depends on how much resource you allocate overall. I strongly suggest you to use asynchronous socket for your server, either epoll and kqueue for unix (epoll for linux, kqueue for freeBSD) or IOCP for Windows. They have the best performance period.