http://www.lenholgate.com/ Len Holgate's thoughts on this and that... Mainly test driven software development in C++ on Windows platforms... - Socket Servers en-us Len.Holgate@JetByte.com 2009-06-22T21:04:37+00:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000855.html I've been working on a library that works in a similar way to our SChannel code and allows the use of the Microsoft "Negotiate" Security Support Provider Interface (SSPI) to provide NTLM and Kerberos support (see SPNEGO for more details).... Posted by Len at 09:04 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 855@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-22T21:04:37+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000854.html As of the next release of the server framework use of catch(...) handlers at thread boundaries, in 'no throw' functions and in destructors will be configurable. At present, in v6.0 and earlier of the server framework, we use catch(...) judiciously... Posted by Len at 10:03 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 854@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-19T10:03:28+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000853.html Back in October 2007 I briefly looked at, what seemed to be at the time, a simple change to the server framework so that you had the option to use buffers that were aligned to page boundaries. This could help... Posted by Len at 07:20 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 853@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-14T19:20:08+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000852.html I've had a couple of requests from clients recently that they be able to handle any structured exceptions in the server framework themselves. Up until now all framework threads install a SEH translator and catch the resulting C++ exceptions in... Posted by Len at 09:30 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 852@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-13T09:30:16+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000851.html Here's a nice piece by Rico Mariani about why Visual Studio is unlikely to go 64 bit any time soon. In a nut shell, unless you have very large data sets that need to be kept in memory you might... Posted by Len at 02:06 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 851@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-11T14:06:55+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000850.html I'm currently working on a new version of the Windows Services library that ships as part of the Licensed I/O Completion Port Server Framework. The Services library allows you to turn your server into a Windows Service very easily and... Posted by Len at 09:48 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 850@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-10T09:48:28+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000848.html There's a race condition in the service shutdown code which is most likely to show up if there's an exception thrown from your implementation of ContinueService(), PauseService() or StopService() but that could show up during any service shutdown sequence. This... Posted by Len at 09:47 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 848@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-01T09:47:41+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000847.html There's a bug in all releases of our performance counter library that may cause the creation of an instance with a name that has been previously used as an instance but that has been released to fail by connecting the... Posted by Len at 08:59 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 847@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-01T08:59:14+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000843.html Often when you're writing a server or client application with the framework you will find yourself needing to perform operations periodically or after a timeout. The framework provides a light weight timer queue that can be used to schedule timers... Posted by Len at 01:25 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 843@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-05-05T13:25:49+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000842.html I'm in the process of upgrading another client to v6.0. These guys write multi-user game systems and have a fairly complex CLR hosting custom application server. Anyway, I was hoping that we'd have a few easy performance wins from the... Posted by Len at 01:16 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Socket Servers ]]> 842@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-04-28T13:16:48+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000841.html Herb Sutter has just published an interesting article over at DDJ on correctly using thread pools: Use Thread Pools Correctly: Keep Tasks Short and Nonblocking. It's not rocket science and it doesn't deal with platform issues but it's a useful... Posted by Len at 08:48 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Socket Servers ]]> 841@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Geek Speak 2009-04-21T08:48:50+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000840.html A user of my free server framework code has reported an error and supplied a fix. The problem is that he's been having connections closing and returning ERROR_CONNECTION_ABORTED and the free code doesn't handle this situation very well and this... Posted by Len at 08:42 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 840@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-04-21T08:42:00+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000839.html A lot of the custom development work that we do for our customers can be classified as developing 'custom application servers'. Development for these kinds of servers usually requires that we design a wire-protocol for communications between the clients and... Posted by Len at 09:31 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 839@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-04-15T09:31:12+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000838.html I'm in the process of upgrading a set of ISO8583 servers for a client. One of these is the original server that caused the server framework to come into existence back in 2002. The other two servers are based on... Posted by Len at 12:02 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 838@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-04-02T12:02:49+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000837.html Mark Russinovich has an excellent piece (here) on how 'non-paged pool' memory sizes are calculated for various versions of Windows operating systems. As those of you who are dealing with high performance, high connection, server systems know, non-paged pool is... Posted by Len at 11:45 AM | Comments (2) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 837@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-03-27T11:45:58+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000836.html The latest, 6.0, release of the server framework is significant for me in several ways. From a purely practical point of view it's the first release from my new Subversion repository and as such it's the culmination of a fair... Posted by Len at 04:20 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 836@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-03-26T16:20:39+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000835.html The latest release of the licensed version of the socket server framework is now available. This release includes the following changes. The following changes were made to the libraries. Admin Library - 6.0 Added back the Admin\VC6Compatibility directory with sal.h... Posted by Len at 04:07 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 835@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-03-26T16:07:30+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000834.html The log file rotation code that I wrote a while back has been working well for several clients. Recently someone suggested that the design of their server's logging meant that they tended to generate lots of useful information on server... Posted by Len at 09:44 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 834@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-03-10T09:44:36+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000833.html I developed the new SChannel SSL adapter for our server framework in a mostly test driven style; a while ago I called this Just In Time Testing... It worked well and, to be honest, I couldn't imagine developing code as... Posted by Len at 02:29 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 833@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-02-18T14:29:48+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000832.html I've just had a memory leak in the SChannel SSL code reported by a client. It's a fairly fundamental leak has highlighted an omission in the mock buffer allocators that I use to test this kind of code; it also... Posted by Len at 11:09 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 832@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-02-16T11:09:38+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000830.html The latest release of the licensed version of the socket server framework is now available. This release includes the following changes. The following changes were made to the libraries. Admin Library - 5.2.5 No Change. C++ Tools Library - 5.2.5... Posted by Len at 11:10 AM | Comments (2) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 830@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-01-29T11:10:11+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000829.html A client has just reported a bug in version 5.2.4 of the server framework. The bug has, possibly, been present since 5.2.2 and relates to the dispatch of OnConnectionClosed() callbacks when a socket is released. If a socket is still... Posted by Len at 08:31 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 829@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-01-29T08:31:15+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000825.html In one of the original articles that introduced the socket server framework I mentioned that the original design was possibly lacking in that it required a critical section per connection and that this could be resource intensive. Shortly after I... Posted by Len at 11:12 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 825@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2008-12-23T11:12:16+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000821.html The latest release of the licensed version of the socket server framework is now available. This release includes the following changes. The following changes were made to the libraries. Admin Library - 5.2.4 We no longer support Visual Studio 6.... Posted by Len at 11:51 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 821@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2008-12-09T11:51:21+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000816.html I had reason to run my deadlock detection tool on a server built with an old version of the server framework as I needed to make changes to the server's locking strategy and I wanted to make sure that I... Posted by Len at 10:43 AM | Comments (1) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 816@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2008-10-21T10:43:19+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000814.html As of release 5.2.4, which is due for release in December, we will no longer support Visual Studio 6 builds of the server framework. I've recently had to deal with some weird multi-threaded problems for a client and upgrading them... Posted by Len at 04:54 PM | Comments (4) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 814@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2008-10-17T16:54:13+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000813.html I'm currently working on an SChannel version of the asynchronous SSL connector code that we use to provide SSL support in the server framework. This will eventually be an alternative to the existing OpenSSL support that we currently provide and... Posted by Len at 01:49 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 813@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2008-10-09T13:49:09+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000810.html I've had a few questions from users and potential users of the JetByte server framework about how it compares to other available frameworks. One such framework is ASIO. The first thing to realise is that the JetByte framework and ASIO... Posted by Len at 09:23 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 810@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2008-09-24T09:23:23+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000807.html I'm in the process of adjusting the asynchronous file log that we use in some of our servers. The log works well and write performance is good for a variety of reasons that I deal with here. The current changes... Posted by Len at 05:08 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 807@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2008-09-05T17:08:19+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000805.html One of the questions that comes up time and again from users of my server framework is "How to I access the list of current connections within the framework". My answer is, you don't, you build your own collection and... Posted by Len at 10:30 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 805@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2008-09-02T10:30:25+00:00