This is really a programming design question more than a specific language or library question. I'm tinkering with the idea of a standalone chat server for websockets that will accept several remote browser-based javascript clients. I'm going for something super simple at first, then might build it up. The server just keeps accepting client connections and listens for messages. When a message is received, it will be sent back to all the clients.
What I need to better understand is which approach is best for sending the messages out to all clients, specifically, sending immediately to all clients, or queuing the messages to each client's queue to be sent when a client connection handler's turn comes up. Below are the two examples in a python-like pseudo-code:
Broadcast Method
def client_handler(client):
while true:
if(client.pending_msg):
rmsg = client.recv()
for c in clients:
c.send(rmsg)
client.sleep(1)
Queue Method
def client_handler(client):
while true:
if client.pending_msg:
rmsg = client.recv()
for c in clients:
c.queue_msg(rmsg)
if client.has_queued:
client.send_queue
client.sleep(1)
What is the best approach? Or, perhaps they are good for different use-cases, in which case, what are the pros, cons and circumstances for which they should be used. Thanks!
First of all, it seems odd to me that a single client handler would know about all the other existing clients. This should be the first thing you should abstract away and create a central message processing handler instead which the individual clients talk to.
That handler can then either send the message directly to the clients (like in your broadcast example), or add them to queues of the clients (like your queue example). Which would be the preferred version depends a bit on your network protocol.
Since you said that you will be using websockets, you have a persistent network connection to the clients anyway, so you can just send them out immediately. There is no real gain to queue (and buffer) the messages. Ideally, a client would just have a send() method anyway, and the client would then internally decide whether that means appending it to a queue or sending it immediately over the network.
Furthermore, since websockets are kind of asynchronous in their nature, you don’t need busy wait loops anyway. You can just listen for messages from the client directly, process those, and broadcast them using your central handler. And since you then don’t have a wait loop anymore, there also would be no place where you work off your queue anymore, making the immediate broadcast the more natural decision.
Related
Im trying to make a tcp communication, where the server sends a message every x seconds through a socket, and should stop sending those messages on a certain condition where the client isnt sending any message for 5 seconds.
To be more detailed, the client also sends constant messages which are all ignored by the server on the same socket as above, and can stop sending them at any unknown time. The messages are, for simplicity, used as alive messages to inform the server that the communication is still relevant.
The problem is that if i want to send repeated messages from the server, i cannot allow it to "get busy" and start receiving messages instead, thus i cannot detect when a new messages arrives from the other side and act accordingly.
The problem is independent of the programming language, but to be more specific im using python, and cannot access the code of the client.
Is there any option of receiving and sending messages on a single socket simultaneously?
Thanks!
Option 1
Use two threads, one will write to the socket and the second will read from it.
This works since sockets are full-duplex (allow bi-directional simultaneous access).
Option 2
Use a single thread that manages all keep alives using select.epoll. This way one thread can handle multiple clients. Remember though, that if this isn't the only thread that uses the sockets, you might need to handle thread safety on your own
As discussed in another answer, threads are one common approach. The other approach is to use an event loop and nonblocking I/O. Recent versions of Python (I think starting at 3.4) include a package called asyncio that supports this.
You can call the create_connection method on an event_loop to create an asyncio connection. See this example for a simple server that reads and writes over TCP.
In many cases an event loop can permit higher performance than threads, but it has the disadvantage of requiring most or all of your code to be aware of the event model.
I have a server process which receives requests from a web clients.
The server has to call an external worker process ( another .py ) which streams data to the server and the server streams back to the client.
The server has to monitor these worker processes and send messages to them ( basically kill them or send messages to control which kind of data gets streamed ). These messages are asynchronous ( e.g. depend on the web client )
I thought in using ZeroMQ sockets over an ipc://-transport-class , but the call for socket.recv() method is blocking.
Should I use two sockets ( one for streaming data to the server and another to receive control messages from server )?
Using a separate socket for signalling and messaging is always better
While a Poller-instance will help a bit, the cardinal step is to use separate socket for signalling and another one for data-streaming. Always. The point is, that in such setup, both the Poller.poll() and the event-loop can remain socket-specific and spent not more than a predefined amount of time, during a real-time controlled code-execution.
So, do not hesitate to setup a bit richer signalling/messaging infrastructure as an environment where you will only enjoy the increased simplicity of control, separation of concerns and clarity of intents.
ZeroMQ is an excellent tool for doing this - including per-socket IO-thread affinity, so indeed a fine-grain performance tuning is available at your fingertips.
I think if figured out a solution, but I don't know if there is a better (more efficient, safer, ...) way of doing this.
The client makes a request to the server, which spawns N processes worker to attend the request.
This is the relevant excerpt from worker.py:
for i in range(start_counter,10):
# Check if there is any message from server
while True:
try:
msg = worker.recv(zmq.DONTWAIT)
print("Received {} from server".format(msg))
except zmq.Again:
break
# Send data to server
worker.send(b"Message {} from {}".format(i, worker_id))
# Take some sleep
time.sleep(random.uniform(0.3, 1.1))
In this way, the worker a) does not need a separate socket and b) does not need a separate thread to process messages from server.
In the real implementation, worker must stream 128 byte messages at 100Hz to the server, and the server must receive lots of this messages (many clients asking requests that need 3-10 worker each).
Will this approach suffer a performance hit if implemented this way?
Let's say I want to implement an echo server and client using ZeroMQ (pyzmq) and asyncio (for its event loop, coroutines, etc.).
Now I want to add more reliability by adding a heartbeat. As I don't want to interact too much with my wonderful echo protocol, this heartbeat is done by both client and server on a dedicated pair of sockets.
From what I understand, the way to go™ is to create a new zmq socket in the server class, register it to the existing Poller and let the server class handle everything, from timeout calculation to sending beats. That works, of course.
But this is more complicated than it should be (that's a personal view). From the server point of view, 'heartbeats' are implementation details. What heartbeats are there for is to answer a simple question: "is the client still there?". More technically, I would like to setup and Heartbeat object that takes a timeout and an address. That Heartbeat object would do all the socket setup, beat-related socket polling, send actual beats and receive them.
From the server point of view, I would just use client.is_alive() when required. But that would require two socket pollers to work in parallel. I can achieve that with an executor, but that does not seem right. How would you do that?
I am currently implementing a socket server using Python's socketServer module. I am struggling to understand how a client 'signals' the server to perform certain tasks.
As you can tell, I am a beginner in this area. I have looked at many tutorials, however, these only tell you how to perform singular tasks in the server e.g. modify a message from the client and send it back.
Ideally what I want to know is there a way for the client to communicate with the server to perform different kinds of tasks.
Is there a standard approach to this issue?
Am I even using the correct type of server?
I was thinking of implementing some form of message passing from the client that tells the server which task it should perform.
I was thinking of implementing some form of message passing from the client that tells the server which task it should perform.
That's exactly what you need: an application protocol.
A socket (assuming a streaming Internet socket, or TCP) is a stream of bytes, nothing more. To give those bytes any meaning, you need a protocol that determines which byte (or sequence thereof) means what.
The main problem to tackle is that the stream that such a socket provides has no notion of "messages". So when one party sends "HELLO", and "BYE" after that, it all gets concatenated into the stream: "HELLOBYE". Or worse even, your server first receives "HELL", followed by "OBYE".
So you need message framing, or rules how to interpret where messages start and end.
You generally don't want to invent your own application protocol. Usually HTTP or other existing protocols are leveraged to pass messages around.
I'm currently writing a project in Python which has a client and a server part. I have troubles with the network communication, so I need to explain some things...
The client mainly does operations the server tells him to and sends the results of the operations back to the server. I need a way to communicate bidirectional on a TCP socket.
Current Situation
I currently use a LineReceiver of the Twisted framework on the server side, and a plain Python socket (and ssl) on client side (because I was unable to correctly implement a Twisted PushProducer). There is a Queue on the client side which gets filled with data which should be sent to the server; a subprocess continuously pulls data from the queue and sends it to the server (see code below).
This scenario works well, if only the client pushes its results to the manager. There is no possibility the server can send data to the client. More accurate, there is no way for the client to receive data the server has sent.
The Problem
I need a way to send commands from the server to the client.
I thought about listening for incoming data in the client loop I use to send data from the queue:
def run(self):
while True:
data = self.queue.get()
logger.debug("Sending: %s", repr(data))
data = cPickle.dumps(data)
self.socket.write(data + "\r\n")
# Here would be a good place to listen on the socket
But there are several problems with this solution:
the SSLSocket.read() method is a blocking one
if there is no data in the queue, the client will never receive any data
Yes, I could use Queue.get_nowait() instead of Queue.get(), but all in all it's not a good solution, I think.
The Question
Is there a good way to achieve this requirements with Twisted? I really do not have that much skills on Twisted to find my way round in there. I don't even know if using the LineReceiver is a good idea for this kind of problem, because it cannot send any data, if it does not receive data from the client. There is only a lineReceived event.
Is Twisted (or more general any event driven framework) able to solve this problem? I don't even have real event on the communication side. If the server decides to send data, it should be able to send it; there should not be a need to wait for any event on the communication side, as possible.
"I don't even know if using the LineReceiver is a good idea for this kind of problem, because it cannot send any data, if it does not receive data from the client. There is only a lineReceived event."
You can send data using protocol.transport.write from anywhere, not just in lineReceived.
"I need a way to send commands from the server to the client."
Don't do this. It inverts the usual meaning of "client" and "server". Clients take the active role and send stuff or request stuff from the server.
Is Twisted (or more general any event driven framework) able to solve this problem?
It shouldn't. You're inverting the role of client and server.
If the server decides to send data, it should be able to send it;
False, actually.
The server is constrained to wait for clients to request data. That's generally the accepted meaning of "client" and "server".
"One to send commands to the client and one to transmit the results to the server. Does this solution sound more like a standard client-server communication for you?"
No.
If a client sent messages to a server and received responses from the server, it would meet more usual definitions.
Sometimes, this sort of thing is described as having "Agents" which are -- each -- a kind of server and a "Controller" which is a single client of all these servers.
The controller dispatches work to the agents. The agents are servers -- they listen on a port, accept work from the controller, and do work. Each Agent must do two concurrent things (usually via the select API):
Monitor a well-known socket on which it will receive work from the one-and-only client.
Do the work (in the background).
This is what Client-Server usually means.
If each Agent is a Server, you'll find lots of libraries will support this. This is the way everyone does it.