Question

In my program there is one thread (receiving thread) that is responsible for receiving requests from a TCP socket and there are many threads (worker threads) that are responsible for processing the received requests. Once a request is processed I need to send an answer over TCP.

And here is a question. I would like to send TCP data in the same thread that I use for receiving data. This thread after receiving data usually waits for new data in select(). So once a worker thread finished processing a request and put an answer in the output queue it has to signal the receiving thread that there are data to send. The problem is that I don’t know how to cancel waiting in select() in order to get out of waiting and to call send() .

Or shall I use another thread solely for sending data over TCP?

Updated

MSalters, Artyom thank you for you answers!

MSalters, having read your answer I found this site: Winsock 2 I/O Methods and read about WSAWaitForMultipleEvents(). My program in fact must work both on HP-UX and Windows I finally decided to use the approach that had been suggested by Artyom.

Answer 1

You need to use something similar to safe-pipe trick, but in your case you need to use a pair of connected TCP sockets.

1. Create a pair of sockets.
2. Add one to the select and wait on it as well
3. Notify by writing to other socket from other threads.
4. Select is immediately waken-up as one of the sockets is readable, reads all the
   data in this special socket and check all data in queues to send/recv

How to create pair of sockets under Windows?

inline void pair(SOCKET fds[2])
{
    struct sockaddr_in inaddr;
    struct sockaddr addr;
    SOCKET lst=::socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM,IPPROTO_TCP);
    memset(&inaddr, 0, sizeof(inaddr));
    memset(&addr, 0, sizeof(addr));
    inaddr.sin_family = AF_INET;
    inaddr.sin_addr.s_addr = htonl(INADDR_LOOPBACK);
    inaddr.sin_port = 0;
    int yes=1;
    setsockopt(lst,SOL_SOCKET,SO_REUSEADDR,(char*)&yes,sizeof(yes));
    bind(lst,(struct sockaddr *)&inaddr,sizeof(inaddr));
    listen(lst,1);
    int len=sizeof(inaddr);
    getsockname(lst, &addr,&len);
    fds[0]=::socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM,0);
    connect(fds[0],&addr,len);
    fds[1]=accept(lst,0,0);
    closesocket(lst);
}

Of course some checks should be added for return values.