how can we tell if the remote server is multi-threaded?

My customer did not gave me details regarding the nature of it's application. It might be multithreaded it might be not. His server serves SOAP mess开发者_高级运维ages (http requests)

Is there any special trick in order to understand if the peer is single or multi threaded?

I don't want to ask the customer and I don't have access to his server/machine. I want to find it myself.

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It's irrelevant. Why do you feel it matters to you?

A more useful question would be:

Can the server accept multiple simultaneous sessions?

The answer is likely to be 'yes, of course' but it's certainly possible to implement a server that's incapable of supporting multiple sessions.

Just because a server supports multiple sessions, it doesn't mean that it's multi-threaded. And, just because it's multi-threaded doesn't mean it will have good performance. When servers need to support many hundreds or thousands of sessions, multi-threading may be a very poor choice for performance.

Are you asking this question because you want to 'overlap' SOAP messages on the same connection - in other words, have three threads send requests, and then all three wait for a response? That won't work, because (like HTTP) request and response messages are paired together on each connection. You would need to open three connections in order to have three overlapped messages.

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Unfortunately, no, at least not without accessing the computer directly. Multiple connections can even be managed by a single thread, however the good news is that this is highly unlikely. Most servers use thread pooling and assign a thread to a connection upon a handshake. Is there a particular reason why you need to know? If you're presumably going to work on this server, you'll know first-hand how it works.

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It doesn't matter if the server is multithreaded or not. There are good and efficient ways to implement I/O multiplexing without threads [like select(2) and suchlike], if that's what worries you.