Develop Reference

Problems With Simple TCP Client C# Windows Form

I'm having a problem with the TCP client that I am working on. For some reason, the client seems to be connecting, but it's not reading anything to the output box. Here is the code:
private void button1_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
string host = textBox1.Text;
int port;
port = Convert.ToInt32(textBox2.Text);
port = int.Parse(textBox2.Text);
string sendText = textBox3.Text;
Socket connectSocket = new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork,
SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp);
connectSocket.Connect(host, port);
System.IO.StreamReader connectionRead
= new System.IO.StreamReader(new NetworkStream(connectSocket));
connectSocket.Send(System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(sendText));
while (connectionRead.Peek() > 0)
{
this.textBox4.AppendText(connectionRead.ReadLine() + "\r\n");
}
connectSocket.Close();
}
I'm sorry about the object names, I did this in a bit of a rush. It shouldn't be too hard to understand though. I'm taking user input from textBox(s) and putting it into variables.
I seem to be getting stuck at:
while (connectionRead.Peek() > 0)
{
this.textBox4.AppendText(connectionRead.ReadLine() + "\r\n");
}
Here, the program freezes for about 20 seconds, then unlocks with no output (the program does not crash).
Any help is appreciated greatly!

I think most of the problem lies in your assumption that if there is a character available in the stream (which you check with StreamReader.Peek()) then you currently have a full line of content available as well. There's no guarantee of this (you may have only received "Hello wo" of the data "Hello world\n"), so a call to ReadLine() would block until a '\n' is received.
However, I'm not sure why it's waiting 20 seconds each time before returning. The default ReadTimeout for NetworkStream is Timeout.Infinite. Are you sure the connection is not being terminated by the server? It may be configured to wait for around 20 seconds of "silence" before closing the connection (fairly common).
As an aside, you also may want to change your condition to while (connectionRead.Peek() > -1). Peek() returns a character integer, and 0 is a valid value ('\0').

C# while remote TCP connection

I am trying to have a server allow TCP connections and and echo out any newline delimited messages being sent. I want multiple clients to be able to connect one after another, maintaining the same server socket. Here's my code:
TcpClient client;
while (true) {
Console.Write("Waiting for connection... ");
client = listener.AcceptTcpListener();
nStream = client.GetStream();
sReader = new StreamReader(nStream);
Console.WriteLine("Connected!");
while (client.Connected) {
string line = sReader.ReadLine();
Console.WriteLine(line);
}
Console.WriteLine("#Client Disconnected")
}
Unfortunately, when the remote client disconnects, it never escapes the "while (client.Connected)" loop. Instead I get an infinite write to STDOUT.

Basically, the property that you're using TcpClient.Connection does not do what you think it does. From the MSDN documentation:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.sockets.tcpclient.connected.aspx
Because the Connected property only reflects the state of the connection as of the most recent operation, you should attempt to send or receive a message to determine the current state. After the message send fails, this property no longer returns true. Note that this behavior is by design. You cannot reliably test the state of the connection because, in the time between the test and a send/receive, the connection could have been lost.
The gist is that the property TcpClient.Connection was not updated after the host disconnected but before your server blocked waiting to read another line from the stream. You need a more reliable way to detect if the connection is active before you block.
Turns out, this question has been asked before. So, I borrowed the answer from here and adapted it to the format that you're using in the OP.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/8631090
static void Main(string[] args)
{
TcpClient client = new TcpClient();
TcpListener listener = new TcpListener(IPAddress.Loopback, 60123);
listener.Start();
while (true)
{
Console.WriteLine("Waiting for connection...");
client = listener.AcceptTcpClient();
Console.WriteLine("Connection found");
StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(client.GetStream());
string line = string.Empty;
while (TestConnection(client))
{
line = reader.ReadLine();
Console.WriteLine(line);
}
Console.WriteLine("Disconnected");
}
}
private static bool TestConnection(TcpClient client)
{
bool sConnected = true;
if (client.Client.Poll(0, SelectMode.SelectRead))
{
if (!client.Connected) sConnected = false;
else
{
byte[] b = new byte[1];
try
{
if (client.Client.Receive(b, SocketFlags.Peek) == 0)
{
// Client disconnected
sConnected = false;
}
}
catch { sConnected = false; }
}
}
return sConnected;
}
This works for me when I test it, and the reason that it works is that you cannot tell if the connection is closed until you attempt to read or write from it. You can do that by blindly trying to read/write and then handling the IO exceptions that come when the socket is closed, or you can do what this tester method is doing and peek to see if the connection is closed.
Hope this helps you
EDIT:
It should be noted that this may or may not be the most efficient way to check if the connection is closed, but it is purely to illustrate that you must check the connection yourself on the server side by reading/writing instead of relying on TcpClient.Connection.
EDIT 2:
My sample doesn't clean up old resources very well, apologies to anyone who had an OCD reaction.

what is the best multi-threading technique in c#

I'm developing an application that is running a lot of TcpListener tasks
using c# with .net 3.5 on windows server 2008
the TcpListener task is:
listening
to get an xml message
read an ID
from it
send a command to a
specific camera based on the ID to
take a snapshot and store it in a
folder
This is meant to execute within 1 second so I can take a snapshot with the camera. I've got a delay in executing this task, using the following code:
private Thread listen_thread;
public void start_listen()
{
this.listen_thread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(save_data));
this.listen_thread.Priority = ThreadPriority.Normal;
this.listen_thread.Start();
}
private void save_data()
{
//work to be done
}
Is this the best multi-threading technique to use? This application is running on a on dell poweredge 2900
with 2 quad core prosessor, and I think it could go faster. How might I be able to improve the latency of this code?
thats the code for the tcplistener
Int32 port = controller_port;
try
{
//this server ip
IPAddress localAddr = IPAddress.Parse(this_ip);
server = new TcpListener(localAddr, port);
server.Start();
Byte[] bytes = new Byte[256];
String data = null;
while (true)
{
Console.Write("Waiting for a connection... ");
TcpClient client = server.AcceptTcpClient();
Console.Write("Connected!");
data = null;
NetworkStream stream = client.GetStream();
int i;
string add_data = "";
Console.Write("Waiting...!");
while ((i = stream.Read(bytes, 0, bytes.Length)) != 0)
{
try
{
string full_row = "";
data = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetString(bytes, 0, i);
Console.Write("Received from controller: " + data);
add_data += data;
}
catch{}
}
}
}
then i divide it to get the ID .

It's not clear at all
how you receive requests
upon what you parallelize the application
It seems that you listen on different sockets and assign a thread on each of them.
I think this is a poor choice, because you can't control the parallelism degree.
You could instead have just one thread that nondeterministically listens on all sockets and assigns the connection to a thread pool, configured to simultaneously run at most n threads, where n is the parallelism degree of your machine (if you have a dual quadcore, n is equal to 8).

These methods have strikingly wrong names. start_listen() doesn't start listening. save_data() cannot possibly save any data until at least a connection is established. Which requires the client code to start up first and make the connection. Sure, one second is quickly gone with that. Starting a thread doesn't take more than a fraction of a millisecond when there's a core available.
Focus on the code that's missing in your snippet.

getting 10060 (Connection Timed Out) when stress testing simple tcp server

I have created simple tcp server - it works pretty well.
the problems starts when we switch to the stress tests -since our server should handle many concurrent open sockets - we have created a stress test to check this.
unfortunately, looks like the server is choking and can not respond to new connection request in timely fashion when the number of the concurrent open sockets are around 100.
we already tried few types of server - and all produce the same behavior.
the server: can be something like the samples in this post(all produce the same behavior)
How to write a scalable Tcp/Ip based server
here is the code that we are using - when a client connects - the server will just hang in order to keep the socket alive.
enter code here
public class Server
{
private static readonly TcpListener listener = new TcpListener(IPAddress.Any, 2060);
public Server()
{
listener.Start();
Console.WriteLine("Started.");
while (true)
{
Console.WriteLine("Waiting for connection...");
var client = listener.AcceptTcpClient();
Console.WriteLine("Connected!");
// each connection has its own thread
new Thread(ServeData).Start(client);
}
}
private static void ServeData(object clientSocket)
{
Console.WriteLine("Started thread " + Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId);
var rnd = new Random();
try
{
var client = (TcpClient)clientSocket;
var stream = client.GetStream();
byte[] arr = new byte[1024];
stream.Read(arr, 0, 1024);
Thread.Sleep(int.MaxValue);
}
catch (SocketException e)
{
Console.WriteLine("Socket exception in thread {0}: {1}", Thread.CurrentThread.ManagedThreadId, e);
}
}
}
the stress test client: is a simple tcp client, that loop and open sokets, one after the other
class Program
{
static List<Socket> sockets;
static private void go(){
Socket newsock = new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork,
SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp);
IPEndPoint iep = new IPEndPoint(IPAddress.Parse("11.11.11.11"), 2060);
try
{
newsock.Connect(iep);
}
catch (SocketException ex)
{
Console.WriteLine(ex.Message );
}
lock (sockets)
{
sockets.Add(newsock);
}
}
static void Main(string[] args)
{
sockets = new List<Socket>();
//int start = 1;// Int32.Parse(Console.ReadLine());
for (int i = 1; i < 1000; i++)
{
go();
Thread.Sleep(200);
}
Console.WriteLine("press a key");
Console.ReadKey();
}
}
}
is there an easy way to explain this behavior? maybe c++ implementation if the TCP server will produce better results? maybe it is actually a client side problem?
Any comment will be welcomed !
ofer

Specify a huge listener backlog: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/5kh8wf6s.aspx

Firstly a thread per connection design is unlikely to be especially scalable, you would do better to base your design on an asynchronous server model which uses IO Completion Ports under the hood. This, however, is unlikely to be the problem in this case as you're not really stressing the server that much.
Secondly the listen backlog is a red herring here. The listen backlog is used to provide a queue for connections that are waiting to be accepted. In this example your client uses a synchronous connect call which means that the client will never have more than 1 connect attempt outstanding at any one time. If you were using asynchronous connection attempts in the client then you would be right to look at tuning the listen backlog, perhaps.
Thirdly, given that the client code doesn't show that it sends any data, you can simply issue the read calls and remove the sleep that follows it, the read calls will block. The sleep just confuses matters.
Are you running the client and the server on the same machine?
Is this ALL the code in both client and server?
You might try and eliminate the client from the problem space by using my free TCP test client which is available here: http://www.lenholgate.com/blog/2005/11/windows-tcpip-server-performance.html
Likewise, you could test your test client against one of my simple free servers, like this one: http://www.lenholgate.com/blog/2005/11/simple-echo-servers.html
I can't see anything obviously wrong with the code (apart from the overall design).

C# Web Server Connection Problem

I'm trying to make a simple C# web server that, at this stage, you can access via your browser and will just do a "Hello World".
The problem I'm having is that the server can receive data fine - I get the browser's header information - but the browser doesn't receive anything I send. Furthermore, I can only connect to the server by going to localhost (or 127.0.0.1). I can't get to it by going to my IP and it's not a network setting because Apache works fine if I run that instead. Also, I'm using a port monitoring program and after I attempt a connection from a browser, the process's port gets stuck in a TIME_WAIT state even though I told the connection to close and it should be back to LISTEN.
Here's the relevant code. A couple calls might not make sense but this is a piece of a larger program.
class ConnectionHandler
{
private Server server;
private TcpListener tcp;
private ArrayList connections;
private bool listening;
private Thread listeningThread;
public Server getServer()
{
return server;
}
private void log(String s, bool e)
{
server.log("Connection Manager: " + s, e);
}
private void threadedListen()
{
while (listening)
{
try
{
TcpClient t = tcp.AcceptTcpClient();
Connection conn = new Connection(this, t);
}
catch (NullReferenceException)
{
log("unable to accept connections!", true);
}
}
log("Stopped listening", false);
}
public void listen()
{
log("Listening for new connections", false);
tcp.Start();
listening = true;
if (listeningThread != null && listeningThread.IsAlive)
{
listeningThread.Abort();
}
listeningThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(
this.threadedListen));
listeningThread.Start();
}
public void stop()
{
listening = false;
if (listeningThread != null)
{
listeningThread.Abort();
log("Forced stop", false);
}
log("Stopped listening", false);
}
public ConnectionHandler(Server server)
{
this.server = server;
tcp = new TcpListener(new IPEndPoint(
IPAddress.Parse("127.0.0.1"), 80));
connections = new ArrayList();
}
}
class Connection
{
private Socket socket;
private TcpClient tcp;
private ConnectionHandler ch;
public Connection(ConnectionHandler ch, TcpClient t)
{
try
{
this.ch = ch;
this.tcp = t;
ch.getServer().log("new tcp connection to "
+ this.tcp.Client.RemoteEndPoint.ToString(), false);
NetworkStream ns = t.GetStream();
String responseString;
Byte[] response;
Int32 bytes;
responseString = String.Empty;
response = new Byte[512];
bytes = ns.Read(response, 0, response.Length);
responseString =
System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetString(response, 0, bytes);
ch.getServer().log("Received: " + responseString);
String msg = "<html>Hello World</html>";
String fullMsg = "HTTP/1.x 200 OK\r\n"
+ "Server: Test Server\r\n"
+ "Content-Type: text/html; "
+ "charset=UTF-8\r\n"
+ "Content-Length: " + msg.Length + "\r\n"
+ "Date: Sun, 10 Aug 2008 22:59:59 GMT"
+ "\r\n";
nsSend(fullMsg, ns);
nsSend(msg, ns);
ns.Close();
tcp.Close();
}
catch (ArgumentNullException e)
{
ch.getServer().log("connection error: argument null exception: " + e);
}
catch (SocketException e)
{
ch.getServer().log("connection error: socket exception: " + e);
}
}
private void nsSend(String s, NetworkStream ns)
{
Byte[] data = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(s);
ns.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
ns.Flush();
ch.getServer().log("Sent: " + s);
}
}
Does anyone have any ideas? It feels like it's gotta be something stupid on my part but I just don't know what. I'd really appreciate any insight

You might like to know that you can use HttpListener to write a basic web-server very easily - this deals with most of the painful bits, letting you concentrate on writing the actual code. The MSDN page gives an example.
Note that this uses HTTP.SYS, which is good - but means that non-admins need to be explicitly given access to open ports; on xp you can do this with httpcfg; on vista you can use netsh. See here for more.

One thing which isn't a problem at the moment but might be later on is that your content length is based on the Unicode length of the message string, not the binary length.
There's also rather a lot going on in the Connection constructor - stuff that really doesn't belong in a constructor at all, IMO. It also doesn't close things if exceptions occur.
Have you looked at what's going on in a network tracer like WireShark? That would be the easiest way of seeing whether any data is getting sent back to the client.
Alternatively, post a short but complete version of your code which we can compile and run ourselves.

Maybe I'm just missing something but the reason you can only connect on localhost is because the IP you are listening on is 127.0.0.1, this makes the TCPListener only listen on that IP address. And I don't see anywhere you are calling any client disconnect, the TCPListener is a blocking call, so it sits there forever until a connection is made. In my past experience with TCP/IP and the TCPListener, TCPClient classes there is not much of a way to force the listener to drop it's connection until you drop the client connection. Calling TCPListener.Abort() doesn't drop the client connection which keeps the port blocked up.

For anyone in similar situation where you want to access you C# server from the local network ip address then you will need to listen to address 0.0.0.0 meaning listen on all ip addresses not a specific one like 127.0.0.1 etc.