The joys and jilts of non-blocking sockets
Panu A Kalliokoski
pkalliok at cc.helsinki.fi
Thu May 31 05:13:32 EDT 2001
Robert Amesz <rcameszREMOVETHIS at dds.removethistoo.nl> wrote:
> I've recently been doing a little work with sockets, more in particular
> non-blocking sockets, and I'm sorry to say the standard Python
I'd say non-blocking sockets are easier to use than blocking ones, but
usually you don't need them for anything. The only problems with
non-blocking sockets are that they can give you interesting error codes
that you have to take action on, and the errors returned vary from
platform to platform. Usually, the right solution is to use select() with
possible timeouts, not non-blocking sockets. That's why I've made the
selecting package (http://sange.fi/~atehwa-u/selecting-0.8/)
Non-blocking sockets only make sense if you have a background task which
you want to accomplish while listening to the sockets. For this special
case, threads are better suited.
> documentation isn't really too helpful here. I feel this is a mistake:
> without documentation people like me will experiment to find out how
I'm not really one of the Python people, but I know the issues on the
socket API are more of OS than language information. The socket
abstraction in Python (at least when I was using it) is not nearly a good
one. Maybe that should be corrected. Anyway, good information on sockets
can be found all over the net and from the Un*x manual (man 2 socket, man
4 socket).
I hope not every language project would have to make new socket tutorials,
as the situation is now. That's a lot of added, overlapping work.
> I've also studied timeoutsocket.py for some hints and pointers about
> socket behaviour, and this is a good source of information about some
> of the quirks of non-blocking sockets, so I'd like to thank
> Timothy O'Malley for that.
Please have a look at the asyncore package (distributed with Python) and
selecting (a pointer to which I gave above).
Panu Kalliokoski
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