Develop Reference

Audio chunk distribution issue in Python based multi-client voice chat with 2 simultaneous speakers

I'm working on a Python based multi-client voice chat application (learning project). While voice transfer between 2 clients works like a charm and the server is also able to handle multiple connections, problems start as soon as 2 persons talk simultaneously. Whenever a client sends audio data (e.g. "AAAA"), while another client is sending "BBBB" the third clients receives something like "ABABABAB".
I've already tried to spawn multiple threads for each user and let a Mutex take control over the clients[] array (the latter one was either implemented wrong or a stupid idea since it doesn't change anything)
I've also included RMS (only send data while somebody is speaking) in order to stop the constant data stream from every connected client, which took a bit of heat from the server and helped a little bit without solving the real problem.
from socket import *
from threading import Thread, Lock
class entry_thread (Thread):
def __init__(self, host, port):
Thread.__init__(self)
adress_voice = (host, port)
self.voice_socket = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM)
self.voice_socket.bind(adress_voice)
self.voice_socket.listen(10)
def run(self):
while True:
sock_v, data_v = self.voice_socket.accept()
thread = handle_client_thread(sock_v, data_v)
thread.start()
class handle_client_thread (Thread):
def __init__(self, vsock, vdata):
global clients
Thread.__init__(self)
self.chunk = 1024
self.vsock = vsock
self.vdata = vdata
self.name = self.vsock.recv(1024).decode()
clients[self.name] = [self.vdata, self.vsock]
def run(self):
global clients
while True:
try:
audio_data = self.vsock.recv(self.chunk)
for x, client in clients.items():
if thread_safe:
mutex.acquire()
try:
if (client[0][1] != self.vdata[1]): #if receipient
# != sender
client[1].send(audio_data)
finally:
if thread_safe:
mutex.release()
except:
break
mutex = Lock()
thread_safe = False
clients = {}
server = entry_thread('', 20003)
server.start()
server.join()

Solved the issue by putting the whole for-loop into the mutex, while giving each user an individual audio channel within the client.

Socket Server with multiply Clients

I just started programming Python.
My goal is to built a digital Picture Frame with three Screens. Therefore I use 3 Raspis, one for each Monitor.
For the communication of these Raspis I need to program a server and a Client.
For a first test I want to built a server which is able to send and receive messages to/from multiple clients.
So I started with a few socket tutorials an created the following program.
Server Class (TcpServer.py)
class TcpServer:
clients = []
serverIsRunning = 0
port = 0
def __init__(self, port):
self.port = port
self.serverIsRunning = 0
self.serverRunning = 0
def startServer (self):
print("start Server...")
self.server = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
self.server.bind(("", self.port))
self.server.listen(1)
self.serverRunning = 1
while self.serverRunning:
read, write, oob = select.select([self.server] + self.clients, [], [])
for sock in read:
if sock is self.server:
client, addr = self.server.accept()
self.clients.append(client)
print ("+++ Client ", addr[0], " verbunden")
else:
nachricht = sock.recv(1024)
ip = sock.getpeername()[0]
if nachricht:
print (ip, nachricht)
else:
print ("+++ Verbindung zu ", ip , " beendet")
sock.close()
self.clients.remove(sock)
for c in self.clients:
c.close()
self.clients.remove(c)
self.server.close()
def send(self, message):
message = message.encode()
self.server.send(message)
Client class (TcpClient.py)
import socket
class TcpClient:
def __init__(self, ip, port):
self.serverAdress = (ip, port)
self.connected = 0
self.connection = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
self.connection.connect(self.serverAdress)
print ("connectet to ", self.serverAdress)
def send(self, message):
message = message.encode()
self.connection.send(message)
Server:
import threading
import TcpServer
tcpServer = TcpServer.TcpServer(50000)
threadTcpServer = threading.Thread(target = tcpServer.startServer)
threadTcpServer.start()
while True:
tcpServer.send(input("Nachricht eingeben: "))
Client:
import threading
import TcpClient
tcpClient = TcpClient.TcpClient("192.168.178.49", 50000)
while True:
tcpClient.send(input("Nachricht eingeben: "))
I can send messages from the Client to the server, but when I want to send a Message from the server to the client it generates the following error:
BrokenPipeError: [Errno 32] Broken pipe
I assume it is because the server thread blocks the socket while waiting of a incoming message. But I have no idea how to handle this.
How can I program a server who can send and receive messages? Can you recommend a tutorial? I didn't found a tutorial who describes a solution for my problem.
Edit:
Now I tried to solve the problem with the socketserver library, but I still can't solve may problem.
here is my new code for the server:
import socketserver
import threading
import time
class MyTCPHandler(socketserver.BaseRequestHandler):
"""
The RequestHandler class for our server.
It is instantiated once per connection to the server, and must
override the handle() method to implement communication to the
client.
"""
def handle(self):
# self.request is the TCP socket connected to the client
self.data = self.request.recv(1024).strip()
print("{} wrote:".format(self.client_address[0]))
print(self.data)
# just send back the same data, but upper-cased
self.request.sendall(self.data.upper())
if __name__ == "__main__":
HOST, PORT = "localhost", 9999
# Create the server, binding to localhost on port 9999
server = socketserver.TCPServer((HOST, PORT), MyTCPHandler)
# Activate the server; this will keep running until you
# interrupt the program with Ctrl-C
threadTcpServer = threading.Thread(target = server.serve_forever)
threadTcpServer.start()
print("server started")
time.sleep(10)
print("sending Data")
server.request.sendall("Server is sending...")
it generates the error:
AttributeError: 'TCPServer' object has no attribute 'request'
My goal is to write a server with a thread who receives Data and still be able to send data from a other thread.
Is this even possible with only one socket?

You should use the provided socketserver rather than writing all the handling of sockets and select etc.
There are multiple problems with your code -
1 - The server is trying to write to the listening socket!! The client communication socket is the one that you get from the accept() call and that is the one you have to use for reading and writing.
2 - The client is sending the data and completing immediately, but it should really wait for getting a response. Otherwise, the python / OS will close the client socket as soon as the program completes and it will mostly be before the server gets a chance to respond.

I believe with the Handler code you are able to receive the data sent by the client on the server and are also able to send some data back from the Handler to the client? You must have understood that the server cannot send any data back unless there is a client connected to it?
Now, to send data to the client (or clients) from "another" thread, you will need a way to make the handler objects or the client sockets (available inside the Handler object as self.request) available to the "another" thread.
One way is to override the def __init__(self, request, client_address, server): method and save this object's reference in a global list. Remember to do the below as the last line of the overridden init -
# BaseRequestHandler __init__ must be the last statement as all request processing happens in this method
socketserver.BaseRequestHandler.__init__(self, request, client_address, server)
Once you have all the client handlers in the global list, you can easily write to all the clients from any thread as per your needs. You must read about synchronization (Locks) and understand that using same object / socket from multiple threads can create some logical / data issues with your application.
Another thing that you have to worry about and code for is cleaning up this global list whenever a client closes the connection.

Listening for socket input in multiple threads

I'm using python sockets.
Here's the problem. I've 2 threads:
One thread listens for socket input from remote and reply to it
One thread polls file and if something is present in file then send
to socket and expect a response.
Now the problem is in case of second thread when I send something, the response doesn't come to this thread. Rather it comes to thread mentioned in (1) point.
This is thread (1)
def client_handler(client):
global client_name_to_sock_mapping
client.send(first_response + server_name[:-1] + ", Press ^C to exit")
user_name = None
while True:
request = client.recv(RECV_BUFFER_LIMIT)
if not user_name:
user_name = process_input(client, request.decode('utf-8'))
user_name = user_name.rstrip()
if user_name not in client_name_to_sock_mapping.keys():
client_name_to_sock_mapping[user_name] = client
else:
msg = "Username not available".encode('ascii')
client.send(msg)
else:
process_input(client, request.decode('utf-8'), user_name)
This is run from thread (2)
def send_compute_to_client():
time.sleep(20)
print("Sleep over")
for _, client_sock in client_name_to_sock_mapping.iteritems():
print("client = {}".format(client_sock))
client_sock.sendall("COMPUTE 1,2,3")
print("send completed = {}".format(client_sock))
data = client_sock.recv(1024)
print("Computed results from client {}".format(data))
Can someone please explain this behaviour?

I have faced similar problems in the past. That happens when in one thread you start a blocking action listening for a connection while in the other thread you send through the same socket.
If I understand it well, you always want to receive the response from the previously send data. So in order to solve it I would use locks to force that behaviour, so just create a class:
from threading import Lock
class ConnectionSession:
def __init__(self, address, conn):
self.ip = address[0] # Optional info
self.port = address[1] # Optional info
self.conn = conn
self.lock = Lock()
Here it goes how to create a ConnectionSession object properly when a listening socket is created:
address = ('127.0.0.1', 46140)
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.bind(address)
conn, addr = s.accept()
session = ConnectionSession(addr, conn)
And here it goes when a 'sending' connection is created:
address = ('127.0.0.1', 46140)
s = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
s.connect(address)
session = ConnectionSession(address, s)
Keep in mind that the created session instance is the one that needs to be shared among threads.
Afterwards, to send information through the shared socket you could do in each thread something like:
# Previous code
try:
session.lock.acquire()
session.conn.sendall("Hi there buddy!")
# Do something if needed
message = session.conn.recv(1024)
except Exception as e:
print "Exception e=%s should be handled properly" % e
finally:
if session.lock.locked():
session.lock.release()
# Other code
Note that the finally block is important as it will free the locked connection whether if the action succeeded or not.
You can also wrap the previous code in a class, e.g: SocketManager with the following code in order to avoid having to explicitly acquire and release locks.
I hope it helps

How to create channel with socket in Python

I've started Python a few times ago and now, I'm currently creating a socket server. I already have the server functioning with multiple threads with multiple clients (Hurray !) But I'm looking for functionality I can't call (i don't even know if it exists) I would like to create a kind of channel where client can send different type of message.
An example I create a channel INFO and if the server received this type of socket it just does a print
I create another channel DEBUG where I can send custom command which the server will execute
etc
In a non-programming language it will do this:
def socketDebug(command):
run command
def socketInfo(input):
print input
if socket == socketDebug:
socketDebug(socket.rcv)
else:
if socket == socketInfo:
socketInfo(socket.rcv)
I hope I'm clear.

Here is a quite simple implementation of a Channel class. It creates a socket, to accept
connections from clients and to send messages. It is also a client itself,
receiving messages from other Channel instances (in separate processes for example).
The communication is done in two threads, which is pretty bad (I would use async io). when
a message is received, it calls the registered function in the receiving thread which
can cause some threading issues.
Each Channel instance creates its own sockets, but it would be much more scalable to
have channel "topics" multiplexed by a single instance.
Some existing libraries provide a "channel" functionality, like nanomsg.
The code here is for educational purposes, if it can help...
import socket
import threading
class ChannelThread(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self):
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
self.clients = []
self.chan_sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM)
self.chan_sock.bind(('',0))
_, self.port = self.chan_sock.getsockname()
self.chan_sock.listen(5)
self.daemon=True
self.start()
def run(self):
while True:
new_client = self.chan_sock.accept()
if not new_client:
break
self.clients.append(new_client)
def sendall(self, msg):
for client in self.clients:
client[0].sendall(msg)
class Channel(threading.Thread):
def __init__(self):
threading.Thread.__init__(self)
self.daemon = True
self.channel_thread = ChannelThread()
def public_address(self):
return "tcp://%s:%d" % (socket.gethostname(), self.channel_thread.port)
def register(self, channel_address, update_callback):
host, s_port = channel_address.split("//")[-1].split(":")
port = int(s_port)
self.peer_chan_sock = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET,socket.SOCK_STREAM)
self.peer_chan_sock.connect((host, port))
self._callback = update_callback
self.start()
def deal_with_message(self, msg):
self._callback(msg)
def run(self):
data = ""
while True:
new_data = self.peer_chan_sock.recv(1024)
if not new_data:
# connection reset by peer
break
data += new_data
msgs = data.split("\n\n")
if msgs[-1]:
data = msgs.pop()
for msg in msgs:
self.deal_with_message(msg)
def send_value(self, channel_value):
self.channel_thread.sendall("%s\n\n" % channel_value)
Usage:
In process A:
c = Channel()
c.public_address()
In process B:
def msg_received(msg):
print "received:", msg
c = Channel()
c.register("public_address_string_returned_in_process_A", msg_received)
In process A:
c.send_value("HELLO")
In process B:
received: HELLO

How can I write a socket server in a different thread from my main program (using gevent)?

I'm developing a Flask/gevent WSGIserver webserver that needs to communicate (in the background) with a hardware device over two sockets using XML.
One socket is initiated by the client (my application) and I can send XML commands to the device. The device answers on a different port and sends back information that my application has to confirm. So my application has to listen to this second port.
Up until now I have issued a command, opened the second port as a server, waited for a response from the device and closed the second port.
The problem is that it's possible that the device sends multiple responses that I have to confirm. So my solution was to keep the port open and keep responding to incoming requests. However, in the end the device is done sending requests, and my application is still listening (I don't know when the device is done), thereby blocking everything else.
This seemed like a perfect use case for a thread, so that my application launches a listening server in a separate thread. Because I'm already using gevent as a WSGI server for Flask, I can use the greenlets.
The problem is, I have looked for a good example of such a thing, but all I can find is examples of multi-threading handlers for a single socket server. I don't need to handle a lot of connections on the socket server, but I need it launched in a separate thread so it can listen for and handle incoming messages while my main program can keep sending messages.
The second problem I'm running into is that in the server, I need to use some methods from my "main" class. Being relatively new to Python I'm unsure how to structure it in a way to make that possible.
class Device(object):
def __init__(self, ...):
self.clientsocket = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
self.serversocket = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
def _connect_to_device(self):
print "OPEN CONNECTION TO DEVICE"
try:
self.clientsocket.connect((self.ip, 5100))
except socket.error as e:
pass
def _disconnect_from_device(self):
print "CLOSE CONNECTION TO DEVICE"
self.clientsocket.close()
def deviceaction1(self, ...):
# the data that is sent is an XML document that depends on the parameters of this method.
self._connect_to_device()
self._send_data(XMLdoc)
self._wait_for_response()
return True
def _send_data(self, data):
print "SEND:"
print(data)
self.clientsocket.send(data)
def _wait_for_response(self):
print "WAITING FOR REQUESTS FROM DEVICE (CHANNEL 1)"
self.serversocket.bind(('10.0.0.16', 5102))
self.serversocket.listen(5) # listen for answer, maximum 5 connections
connection, address = self.serversocket.accept()
# the data is of a specific length I can calculate
if len(data) > 0:
self._process_response(data)
self.serversocket.close()
def _process_response(self, data):
print "RECEIVED:"
print(data)
# here is some code that processes the incoming data and
# responds to the device
# this may or may not result in more incoming data
if __name__ == '__main__':
machine = Device(ip="10.0.0.240")
Device.deviceaction1(...)
This is (globally, I left out sensitive information) what I'm doing now. As you can see everything is sequential.
If anyone can provide an example of a listening server in a separate thread (preferably using greenlets) and a way to communicate from the listening server back to the spawning thread, it would be of great help.
Thanks.
EDIT:
After trying several methods, I decided to use Pythons default select() method to solve this problem. This worked, so my question regarding the use of threads is no longer relevant. Thanks for the people who provided input for your time and effort.

Hope it can provide some help, In example class if we will call tenMessageSender function then it will fire up an async thread without blocking main loop and then _zmqBasedListener will start listening on separate port untill that thread is alive. and whatever message our tenMessageSender function will send, those will be received by client and respond back to zmqBasedListener.
Server Side
import threading
import zmq
import sys
class Example:
def __init__(self):
self.context = zmq.Context()
self.publisher = self.context.socket(zmq.PUB)
self.publisher.bind('tcp://127.0.0.1:9997')
self.subscriber = self.context.socket(zmq.SUB)
self.thread = threading.Thread(target=self._zmqBasedListener)
def _zmqBasedListener(self):
self.subscriber.connect('tcp://127.0.0.1:9998')
self.subscriber.setsockopt(zmq.SUBSCRIBE, "some_key")
while True:
message = self.subscriber.recv()
print message
sys.exit()
def tenMessageSender(self):
self._decideListener()
for message in range(10):
self.publisher.send("testid : %d: I am a task" %message)
def _decideListener(self):
if not self.thread.is_alive():
print "STARTING THREAD"
self.thread.start()
Client
import zmq
context = zmq.Context()
subscriber = context.socket(zmq.SUB)
subscriber.connect('tcp://127.0.0.1:9997')
publisher = context.socket(zmq.PUB)
publisher.bind('tcp://127.0.0.1:9998')
subscriber.setsockopt(zmq.SUBSCRIBE, "testid")
count = 0
print "Listener"
while True:
message = subscriber.recv()
print message
publisher.send('some_key : Message received %d' %count)
count+=1
Instead of thread you can use greenlet etc.