Socket Receive Buffer

[John Burton]

christofer wrote:

> I am writing a small IRC type server. I also have a small test client
> for obvious reasons. My problem is that when receiving input from the
> server, my client sometimes ends up with two messages in the same
> input buffer, which obviously causes problems. Anybody know why it is
> doing this?

It's the way that sockets work.
They are just a stream of bytes.
You *might* read the whole message you sent in one go, or you might get 
60% of the message in one read and 40% in the next, or you might be two 
messages together, or any other cominbation.

Often you'll get each message seperately when testing on a low load 
local network but get different results over the internet.

You need to find the end of the messages yourself, and remember that a 
single read might not return the whole of the messasge.

Yes it's a pain but that's how it works.