Martin, Wilhelm, On 14 Jan 2011, at 20:31, mkobetic@gmail.com wrote:

"Sven Van Caekenberghe"<sven@beta9.be> wrote:

...

Each #acceptWaitTimeout seconds, 'Wait for accept timed out' is printed on the log and another accept/wait starts. This looping improves liveliness and responsiveness to other events.

Given that accept is generally done on the server side, usually in a background process, I have to say I'd be inclined to side with Wilhelm on this one. I don't see much that the server can do than go back into another accept loop. You can't predict how long will it take for the next client to connect, so a timeout isn't a sign of an issue. So I don't see much use for timeout on accept.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "improving liveliness". If the implementation needs to get out of accept to let other processes respond to events, then I wouldn't call that a feature. But these are really more philosophical points. In practice, wrapping a loop around an accept timeout isn't a big deal either, as long as it works as needed.

On 14 Jan 2011, at 20:45, Schwab,Wilhelm K wrote:

Sven,

Thanks for the code!

The fact that I have to decide what constitutes an "infinite" delay seems wrong to me. It should just do what I tell it and either calmly wait for an event to let the code move forward (assuming that only the calling thread is blocked). One example: if I know I typed an incorrect address, then any time is wasted. If it's correct and the connection is slow (I downloaded a pdf of a paper earlier this week, and it was miserably slow but worked fine), I probably want the code to keep running without trying to think for itself.

"This looping improves liveliness and responsiveness to other events."

Why does looping on things that should be blocking until events arrive improve response to other events? This seems like a bailing wire solution to the problem.

Of course it would be better if there was an #waitForAccept variant that waited forever. The fact that you keep looping can be handy to do periodic tasks like cleanups without starting a new thread. In Java you can set the timeout of a ServerSocket and the accept will fall through as well, it is just an option. Sven