Is it possible to make a thread server, and another client in one application. The end result will be a binary that will use one thread as server and another as client. This means two different threads will be using same port, is this possible?
I'll be using python for writing this app.
Yes; if you're listening on a port in one thread, you can connect to it on a different thread in the same process.
In Python, this would be achieved using the threading module.
Related
I would like to have a server process (preferably Python) that accepts simple messages and multiple clients (again, preferably Python) that connect to the server and send messages to it. The server and clients will only ever be running on the same local machine and the OS is Linux based. The server will be automatically started by the OS and the clients started later independent of the server. I strongly want to avoid installing a whole separate messaging framework/server to do this. The messages will be simple strings such as "kick" or even just a single byte representing the message type. It also needs to know when a connection is made and lost.
From these requirements, I think named pipes would be a feasible solution, with a new instance of that pipe created for each client connection. However, when I search for examples, all of the ones I have come across deal with processes that are spawned from the same parent process and not independently started which means they can pass a parent reference to the child.
Windows seems to allow multiple instances of a named pipe (one for each client connection), but I'm unsure if this is possible on a Linux based OS?
Please could someone point me in the right direction, preferably with a basic example, even if it's just pseudo-code.
I've looked at the multiprocessing module in Python, but this seems to be oriented around the server and client sharing the same process or having one spawn the other.
Edit
May be important, the host device is not guaranteed to have networking capabilities (embedded device).
I've used zeromq for this sort of thing before. it's a relatively lightweight library that exposes this sort of functionality
otherwise, you could implement it yourself by binding a socket in the server process and having clients connect to it. this works fine for unix domain sockets, just pass AF_UNIX when creating the socket, e.g:
import socket
with socket.socket(socket.AF_UNIX) as s:
s.bind('/tmp/srv')
s.listen(1)
(c, addr) = s.accept()
with c:
c.send(b"hello world")
for the server, and:
with socket.socket(socket.AF_UNIX) as c:
c.connect('/tmp/srv')
print(c.recv(8192))
for the client.
writing a protocol around this is more involved, which is where things like zmq really help where you can easily push JSON messages around
Let say we have a server application written in Python.
Let also say that this main server process forked two more processes at the startup.
Server awaits its clients, and when one comes decides to which of two forked processes should pass the client's socket.
I do not want to fork a process each time a client comes; I want to have fixed number of servers, but one main server that receives a connection, then pass it to a server that deals with a specific work client asked for.
This should be a DOS attack protection, job separation, etc. etc.
Is there any trick to pass a Python object between started Python programs.
Some shared memory or something like that?
Would pickling the socket object and pushing it through IPC work?
Would pickling the socket object and pushing it through IPC work?
No. Inside that object is a file descriptor or handle to the kernel socket. It's just a number that the process uses to identify the socket when making system calls.
If you pickle that Python socket object and send it to another process, that process will be using a handle for a socket it didn't open. Or worse, that handle may refer to a different open file.
The most efficient way to handle this (on Linux) is like this:
Master process opens listening socket (e.g. TCP port 80)
Master process forks N children who all inherit that open socket
They all call accept() and block, waiting for a new connection
When a new client connects, the kernel will select one of the processes with a handle to that socket to accept the connection; the others will continue to wait
This way, you let the kernel handle the load balancing.
If you don't want this behavior, there is a way (in UNIX) to pass an open socket to another process. Again, this is more than just the handle; the kernel effectively copies the open socket to your processs's open file list. This mechanism is known as SCM_RIGHTS, and you can see an example (in C) here:
http://man7.org/tlpi/code/online/dist/sockets/scm_rights_send.c.html
Otherwise, your master process will need to effectively proxy the connection to the child processes, reducing thr efficiency of the system.
How can i pool a connection to XMPP server in django so that it is available across multiple requests. I don't want to connect and authenticate on every request which makes it a bit slow. Is this possible?
EDIT:
I am using xmpppy python xmpp library
As xmpppy has its own main loop I suggest to use it in a separate thread or even start separately. Actually you do have two separate applications: website and xmpp-client and it is normal to run them separately.
In this case you may use different ways to communicate between your applications: pipes between threads and/or processes, tcp or unix socket, file queue, different amqp silutions, any persistent storage, even d-bus, etc. But that is a subject for another question I think.
I have a python application , to be more precise a Network Application that can't go down this means i can't kill the PID since it actually talks with other servers and clients and so on ... many € per minute of downtime , you know the usual 24/7 system.
Anyway in my hobby projects i also work a lot with WSGI frameworks and i noticed that i have the same problem even during off-peak hours.
Anyway imagine a normal server using TCP/UDP ( put here your favourite WSGI/SIP/Classified Information Server/etc).
Now you perform a git pull in the remote server and there goes the new python files into the server (these files will of course ONLY affect the data processing and not the actual sockets so there is no need to re-raise the sockets or touch in any way the network part).
I don't usually use File monitors since i prefer to use SIGNAL to wakeup the internal app updater.
Now imagine the following code
from mysuper.app import handler
while True:
data = socket.recv()
if data:
socket.send(handler(data))
Lets imagine that handler is a APP with DB connections, cache connections , etc.
What is the best way to update the handler.
Is it safe to call reload(handler) ?
Will this break DB connections ?
Will DB Connections survive to this restart ?
Will current transactions be lost ?
Will this create anti-matter ?
What is the best-pratice patterns that you guys usually use if there are any ?
It's safe to call reload(handler).
Depends where you initialize your connections. If you make the connections inside handler(), then yes, they'll be garbage collected when the handler() object falls out of scope. But you wouldn't be connecting inside your main loop, would you? I'd highly recommend something like:
dbconnection = connect(...)
while True:
...
socket.send(handler(data, dbconnection))
if for no other reason than that you won't be making an expensive connection inside a tight loop.
That said, I'd recommend going with an entirely different architecture. Make a listener process that does basically nothing more than listen for UDP datagrams, sends them to a messaging queue like RabbitMQ, then waits for the reply message to send the results back to the client. Then write your actual servers that get their requests from the messaging queue, process them, and send a reply message back.
If you want to upgrade the UDP server, launch the new instance listening on another port. Update your firewall rules to redirect incoming traffic to the new port. Reload the rules. Kill the old process. Voila: seamless cutover.
The real win is from uncoupling your backend. Since multiple processes can listen for the same messages from your frontend "proxy" service, you can run several in parallel - on different machines, if you want to. To upgrade the backend, start a new instance then kill the old one so that there's no time when at least one instance isn't running.
To scale your proxy, have multiple instances running on different ports or different hosts, and configure your firewall to randomly redirect incoming datagrams to one of the proxies.
To scale your backend, run more instances.
I'm trying to figure out how to make a server that can accept multiple clients at one time. While doing so, I need the client able to send and receive data from the server at the same time.
Would i have to make a threaded server? And have a thread for listening for data.
And then another thread for sending out information to the client?
Then for the client side, do i need use threads to send/get info?
Use async IO. There are dozen of async IO socket libs for python. Here is a brief benchmark.
I also tested gevent, eventlet, asyncore, twisted, pyev, pycurl, tornado.
Twsited
is stable but most slow and also not easy to start with.
gevent, eventlet (libevent)
easy to start and fast (code looks like blocking) but have some issues with forking.
pycurl (libcurl)
fast and easy (if you ok to do flags magic.. but there are example) but only http.
pyev (libev)
you must understand what you are doing almost like polling yourself.
tornado (polling in python)
fast enough and i think stable and also easy to start.
asyncore
really fast.. but don't use it.. it is ugly-ugly.
Don't use threads in python unless you are really know what you are doing.
Python and threads not really big friends (unless version <3.2 in 3.2 there must be a new gil).
On server-side you clearly need a Socket Server. This server creates a new thread for every incoming client connection.
Once a connection is established, both the client and the thread that was instantiated for the communication require an additional thread if they have to do other business in parallel than listening to the socket if the communication is synchronous. In case an asynchronous communication is what you need, then Python provides an excellent Asynchronous Socket Handler.
Use a asynchronous socket. Example server could be found here and the client code here. No direct hassle with threads. Depending on your needs, you probably don't need the asynchronous client.
You don't need threads for either client or server; you can instead select() to multiplex all the I/O inside a single thread.