Question

I’m trying to write a voting server and client, so you start the program and it displays the voting form and you can vote on various items. For the server part I’ve got the server running in a separate thread, but it’s using a lot of CPU, how do I reduce the amount of CPU it’s using?

this is my server:

        Form1 main = new Form1();

        try
        {
            IPAddress ipAd = IPAddress.Parse(main.ipAddress); //use local m/c IP address, and use the same in the client

            /* Initializes the Listener */
            TcpListener myList = new TcpListener(ipAd, 55548);

            /* Start Listeneting at the specified port */
            myList.Start();

            while (true)
            {
                string message = "";
                Socket s = myList.AcceptSocket();



                if (main.users.Contains(s.RemoteEndPoint.ToString()) == false)
                    main.users.Add(s.RemoteEndPoint.ToString());



                byte[] b = new byte[500];
                int k = s.Receive(b);



                for (int i = 0; i < k; i++)
                {
                    message += (Convert.ToString(b[i]));
                }

                string[] messageArray = message.Split('/');

                MessageBox.Show("help");

                if (messageArray[0].CompareTo("vote") == 0)
                {

                    if (main.votes.ContainsKey(messageArray[1]) != true) main.votes.Add(messageArray[1], 1);
                    else main.votes[messageArray[1]]++;

                    string[] temp = main.textBox1.Text.Split(' ');
                    int numVotes = Convert.ToInt32(temp[1]);
                    numVotes++;
                    main.textBox1.Text = temp[0] + " " + Convert.ToString(numVotes);

                }
                if (messageArray[0].CompareTo("start") == 0)
                {
                    main.updateEverything();
                }
                if(messageArray[0].CompareTo("withdraw") == 0)
                {
                    main.votes[messageArray[1]]--;

                    string[] temp = main.textBox1.Text.Split(' ');
                    int numVotes = Convert.ToInt32(temp[1]);
                    numVotes--;
                    main.textBox1.Text = temp[0] + " " + Convert.ToString(numVotes);
                }

                /* clean up */
                s.Close();
                myList.Stop();
            }
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("Error..... " + e.StackTrace);
        }

Answer 1

You are using a blocking type of connection. The loop you create causes a CPU overhead because of the TcpListener.AcceptConnection(). Your solution is to accept non-blocking socket connections, which is done by receiving data from socket asynchronously.

Here’s the msdn link that explains how it works.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dxkwh6zw.aspx