Question

Is there any faster way to tell if the client has data available? I’m not saying it is slow to use TcpClient.Available, but I am curious to know if it is the fastest way.

Answer 1

TcpClient.Available is not slow in itself, it just depends how you use it.

If you only use it ponctually to check if there is available data, then it is the way to go.

If you use it in a loop in order to wait for data, the overall performance of your program will be quite bad. Here is one of this bad usage:

public void Receive()
{
    while (tcpClient.Connected)
    {
        if (tcpClient.Available >= 0)
        {
            // Do something
        }
    }
}

For this second scenario, you can achieve what you want using either:

• Asynchronous reads (look at NetworkStream.BeginRead) => most scalable
• Blocking reads (look at the solution proposed here, which makes use of NetworkStream.Read)