Question

I’m developing an application that is running a lot of TcpListener tasks
using c# with .net 3.5 on windows server 2008

the TcpListener task is:

1. listening
   to get an xml message
2. read an ID
   from it
3. send a command to a
   specific camera based on the ID to
   take a snapshot and store it in a
   folder

This is meant to execute within 1 second so I can take a snapshot with the camera. I’ve got a delay in executing this task, using the following code:

private Thread listen_thread;

    public void start_listen()
    {
            this.listen_thread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(save_data));
            this.listen_thread.Priority = ThreadPriority.Normal;
            this.listen_thread.Start();

    }
    private void save_data()
    {
        //work to be done
    }

Is this the best multi-threading technique to use? This application is running on a on dell poweredge 2900
with 2 quad core prosessor, and I think it could go faster. How might I be able to improve the latency of this code?

thats the code for the tcplistener

Int32 port = controller_port;
        try
        {
            //this server ip
            IPAddress localAddr = IPAddress.Parse(this_ip);
            server = new TcpListener(localAddr, port);
            server.Start();
            Byte[] bytes = new Byte[256];
            String data = null;
            while (true)
            {
                Console.Write("Waiting for a connection... ");
                TcpClient client = server.AcceptTcpClient();
                Console.Write("Connected!");
                data = null;
                NetworkStream stream = client.GetStream();
                int i;
                string add_data = "";
                Console.Write("Waiting...!");
                while ((i = stream.Read(bytes, 0, bytes.Length)) != 0)
                {
                    try
                    {
                        string full_row = "";
                        data = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetString(bytes, 0, i);
                        Console.Write("Received from controller: " + data);
                        add_data += data;
                    }
                    catch{}
                }
            }
         }

then i divide it to get the ID .

Answer 1

It’s not clear at all

1. how you receive requests
2. upon what you parallelize the application

It seems that you listen on different sockets and assign a thread on each of them.

I think this is a poor choice, because you can’t control the parallelism degree.

You could instead have just one thread that nondeterministically listens on all sockets and assigns the connection to a thread pool, configured to simultaneously run at most n threads, where n is the parallelism degree of your machine (if you have a dual quadcore, n is equal to 8).