The posix C write() and thread-safety

There is a way to serialize the C write() so that I can write bytes on a socket, share开发者_JAVA技巧d between k-threads, with no data-loss? I imagine that a solution to this problem includes user-space locking, and what about scalability? Thank you in advance.

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I think the right answer depends on whether your threads need to synchronously wait for a response or not. If they just need to write some message to a socket and not wait for the peer to respond, I think the best answer is to have a single thread that is dedicated to writing messages from a queue that the other threads place messages on. That way, the worker threads can simply place their messages on the queue and get on with doing something else.

Of course, the queue has to be protected by a mutex but any one thread only has to hold the lock for as long as it is manipulating the queue (guaranteed to be quite a short time). The more obvious alternative of letting every thread write directly to the socket requires each thread to hold the lock for as long as it takes the write operation to complete. This will always be much longer than just adding an item to a queue since write is a system call and potentially, it could block for a long period.

Even if your threads need a response to their messages, it may still pay to do something similar. Your socket servicing thread becomes more complex because you'll have to do something like select() on the socket for reads and writes to stop it from blocking and you'll also need a way to match up messages to responses and a way to inform the threads when their responses have arrived.

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Since POSIX does not seem to specify atomicity guarantees on send(2), you will likely have to use a mutex. Scalability of course goes down the drain with this sort of serialization.

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One possible approach would be to use the locking mechanism. Every thread should wait for a lock before writing any thing on the socket and should release the lock, once it is done. If all of your threads are sending exactly the same kind of messages, the receiver end would not have any problem in reading the data, but if different threads can send different kind of data with possible different info, you should have an unique message id associated with each kind of data and its better to send the thread id as well (although not necessary, but might help you in debugging small issues).

You can have a structure like:

typedef struct my_socket_data_st
{
int msg_id;
#ifdef __debug_build__
    int thread_id;
#endif
size_t data_size_in_bytes;
.... Followed by your data ....
} my_socket_data_t

Scalability depends on a lot things including the hardware resources on which your application would be running. Since it is a network application, you will have to think about the network bandwidth as well. Although there is no (there are a few, but I think you can ignore them for now for your application) limitation from OS on sending/receiving data over a socket, but you will have to consider about making the send synchronous or asynchronous based on your requirement. Also since, you are taking a lock, you will have to think about lock congestion as well. If the lock is not available easily for other threads, that will degrade the performance by a huge factor.