16.7 Summary

Our example of nonblocking reads and writes in Section 16.2 took our str_cli echo client and modified it to use nonblocking I/O on the TCP connection to the server. select is normally used with nonblocking I/O to determine when a descriptor is readable or writable. This version of our client is the fastest version that we show, although the code modifications are nontrivial. We then showed that it is simpler to divide the client into two pieces using fork; we will employ the same technique using threads in Figure 26.2.

Nonblocking connects let us do other processing while TCP's three-way handshake takes place, instead of being blocked in the call to connect. Unfortunately, these are also nonportable, with different implementations having different ways of indicating that the connection completed successfully or encountered an error. We used nonblocking connects to develop a new client, which is similar to a Web client that opens multiple TCP connections at the same time to reduce the clock time required to fetch numerous files from a server. Initiating multiple connections like this can reduce the clock time, but is also "network-unfriendly" with regard to TCP's congestion avoidance.