Drop unfounded claims about performance.

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Martin v. Löwis 2011-06-06 10:25:55 +02:00
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commit 2d449aa004
1 changed files with 1 additions and 27 deletions

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@ -386,32 +386,6 @@ determining whether the other end is done, or just busy with something else.
files. Don't try this on Windows. On Windows, ``select`` works with sockets
only. Also note that in C, many of the more advanced socket options are done
differently on Windows. In fact, on Windows I usually use threads (which work
very, very well) with my sockets. Face it, if you want any kind of performance,
your code will look very different on Windows than on Unix.
very, very well) with my sockets.
Performance
-----------
There's no question that the fastest sockets code uses non-blocking sockets and
select to multiplex them. You can put together something that will saturate a
LAN connection without putting any strain on the CPU. The trouble is that an app
written this way can't do much of anything else - it needs to be ready to
shuffle bytes around at all times.
Assuming that your app is actually supposed to do something more than that,
threading is the optimal solution, (and using non-blocking sockets will be
faster than using blocking sockets). Unfortunately, threading support in Unixes
varies both in API and quality. So the normal Unix solution is to fork a
subprocess to deal with each connection. The overhead for this is significant
(and don't do this on Windows - the overhead of process creation is enormous
there). It also means that unless each subprocess is completely independent,
you'll need to use another form of IPC, say a pipe, or shared memory and
semaphores, to communicate between the parent and child processes.
Finally, remember that even though blocking sockets are somewhat slower than
non-blocking, in many cases they are the "right" solution. After all, if your
app is driven by the data it receives over a socket, there's not much sense in
complicating the logic just so your app can wait on ``select`` instead of
``recv``.