Client server application with notifications using NetMQ - c#

I need to create client-server applications in local network with such functionality:
single server (data access and so on ...)
multi clients (ordinary 3-5, up to 20)
each client must authorize on server (need to check what rights it has)
client send request to server (ordinary less than 1 Kb, up to 3-5 Kb) and get responses (ordinary 30-100 Kb, some times it can be a big amount of data, up to 1-2 Mb)
after some queries from client(s) server notifies all clients and send them new and updated data (so server must know how much clients are connected)
if network connection dies, client must reconnect
I think NetMQ with Protobuf will be enough for my purposes. I look at documents and see, that the most suitable pattern for my task is http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all#Service-Oriented-Reliable-Queuing-Majordomo-Pattern when each client is a worker and server worker is a client at same time.
I think this solution too is complicated?
Are there simpler ways to solve such problem (simpler pattern or maybe something based on WCF)?

Related

How to solve limitations of SignalR in scaleout for backplane

I use ASP.NET MVC and C# .I found SignalR for transfer data in real time,but signalR have some limits.
according to the issue for this :
Using a backplane, the maximum message throughput is lower than it is when clients talk directly to a single server node. That's because the backplane forwards every message to every node, so the backplane can become a bottleneck. Whether this limitation is a problem depends on the application. For example, here are some typical SignalR scenarios:
Server broadcast (e.g., stock ticker): Backplanes work well for this
scenario, because the server controls the rate at which messages are
sent.
Client-to-client (e.g., chat): In this scenario, the backplane might
be a bottleneck if the number of messages scales with the number of
clients; that is, if the rate of messages grows proportionally as
more clients join.
High-frequency realtime (e.g., real-time games): A backplane is not
recommended for this scenario.
My project needs to High-frequency realtime (e.g., real-time games) .
Also I need real time video chat
My scenario :
I have a Master server and multi Slave servers, Clients connect to the Slave servers and ans Slave servers connect to Master server.
Example :
Server Slave-1 and server Slave-2 connected to Master server, client-A and client-B connected to Slave-1 an client-C and client-D connected to Slave-2,
client-A send message or data or in live chat with client-D
How I can implement this scenario ?
[Update-1]
If i don't use signalR for that problem, So what should I use?
[Update-2]
In my scenario, the master server acts like a router and Slave server acts like a switch . Clients connected to switch and switch connected to router .if client-A send data packet to client-C, data packet should be send to router and router handle data packet.Over 2000 possible number of Slave servers and the number of users for each server it is over 10,000.
Thanks.
A backplane will introduce delays in message delivery, which will not work well for low-latency work. If you absolutely must have multiple servers to handle your clients, and you absolutely must have minimal latency, then a backplane is probably not going to work for you.
However, check out this conversation on the ASP forums. The poster is seeing average latencies of around 25ms for 60,000 messages per second to 3,000 connected clients on one server.
As is often the case, the trade-off here is between latency and complexity. The optimal solution is for messages to be routed only to the server(s) containing the target client(s). To achieve this you need a way to track every client connection, deal with reconnects to different servers, etc. You can probably solve this with a few tens of hours of hard slog programming, but in doing so you're going to break most of what makes SignalR useful.
For alternatives, the first that comes to mind is ZeroMQ. A bit more work, especially if your clients are browser based, but low latency and high throughput are project goals for ZeroMQ. You'll need to handle scale-out yourself though... and you're back to tracking connection points across multiple servers and reconnects.
If neither of these solves your problems, then you might have to look at changing your architecture. One common method for MMOs is to have related clients connect to the same servers to reduce inter-server communication requirements. Clients who legitimately need to communicate real-time data are put together on a single server which doesn't have to worry about back-plane issues. This server then communicates back to the 'Master' server only what is required to maintain world state and so on.
Plan your architecture to reduce the problems before they start... but don't spend weeks working on something that might not be necessary. Do some tests on SignalR and see what effect the backplane actually has on latency before you dive into the abyss.

Thread Management in C# Socket Programming

I have got an TCP Socket Application that client side sending huge string messages to server at same time.And server getting this messages writing them into Access DB.So if there are so many clients server side can not handle each client properly and sometime server closing itself.
Is there any way tell client's thread before send message wait for queue if there is another client currently in queue? With this server don't need to be handle for example 30 client's demand at same time.
For example;
Client sends message => Server processing 1 client's demand
Client is waiting for 1 client's demands for complete than 2 Client sends message => Server processing 1 client's demand
Client is waiting for 2 client's demands for complete.
My problem is appears when I use access db. While opening access connection saving data into tables and closing db is taking time and server go haywire :) If I don't use access db I can get huge messages with no problem.
Yes, you can do that however that s not the most efficient way of doing it. Your scheme is single threaded.
What you want to do is create a threadpool and accept messages from multiple clients and process them as seperate threads.
If that s too complicated. You can have a producer consumer queue within your server, all incoming messages will be stored in a queue while your server will be processing them first come first serve basis.
I think you should consider using a web server for your application, and replacing your protocol with HTTP. Instead of sending huge strings on a TCP stream, just POST the string to the server using your favorite HttpClient class.
By moving to HTTP you more or less solve all your performance issues. The web server already knows how to handle multiple long requests so you don't need to worry about that. Since you're sending big strings, the HTTP overhead is not going to affect your performance.

Async Sockets example which shows passing an object?

I need to create a server process which can push high frequency data (1000 updates per second) to around 50 client. I'm thinking the best way you do this is using async sockets with the SocketAsyncEventArgs type.
The client -> server connections will be long running at least several days to indefinite. I plan to have a server process listening and the clients connect and the server starts pushing the data to the clients.
Can someone point me to or show me an example of how to do this? I can't find any example showing a server process pushing an object to a client.
EDIT: This is over a gigibit LAN. Using windows server with 16 cores and 24gb ram
thanks
First, some more requirements from your side is required. You have server with lots of muscle, but it will fail miserably if you don't do what has to be done.
can the client live without some of the data? I mean, does the stream of the data need to reach other side in proper order, without any drops?
how big is 'the data'? few bytes or?
fact: scheduling interval on windows is 10 msec.
fact: no matter WHEN you send, clients will receive it depending on lots of stuff - network config, number of routers in-between, client processor load, and so on. so you need some kind of timestamping here
Depending on all this, you could design a priority queue with one thread servicing it and sending out UDP datagrams for each client. Also, since (4) is in effect, you can 'clump' some of your data together and have 10 updates per second of 100 data.
If you want to achieve something else, then LAN will be required here with lots of quality network equipment.
If you want to use .NET Sockets to create this server-client project, then this is a good outline of what's needed:
Since the server will be transferring data to several clients simultaneously, you'll need to use the asynchronous Socket.Beginxxx methods or the SocketAsyncEventArgs class.
You'll have clients connect to your server. The server will accept those connections and then add the newly connected client to an internal clients list.
You'll have a thread running within the server, that periodically sends notifications to all sockets in the clients list. If any exceptions/errors occurs while sending data to a socket, then that client is removed from the list.
You'll have to make sure that access to the clients list is synchronized since the server is a multithreaded application.
You don't need to worry about buffering your send data since the TCP stack takes care of that. If you do not want to buffer your data at all (i.e. have the socket send data immediately), then set Socket.NoDelay to true.
It doesn't seem like you need any data from your clients, but if you do, you'd have to make sure your server has a Socket.BeginReceive loop if using Socket.BeginXXX pattern or Socket.ReceiveAsync method if using SocketAsyncEventArgs.
Once you have the connection and transmission of data between server and client going, you then need to worry about serialization and deserialization of objects between client and server.
Serialization which occurs on the server is easy, since you can use the BinaryFormatter or other encoders to encode your object and dump the data onto the socket.
Deserialization on the other hand, which occurs on the client, can be pretty complex because an object can span multiple packets and you can have multiple objects in one packet. You essentially need a way to identify the beginning and end of an object within the stream, so that you can pluck out the object data and deserialize it.
One way to do this is to embed your data in a well known protocol, like HTTP, and send it using that format. Unfortunately, this also means you'd have to write a HTTP parser at the client. Not an easy task.
Another way is to leverage an existing encoding scheme like Google's protocol buffers. This approach would require learning how to use the protocol buffers stack.
You can also embed the data in an XML structure and then have a stream-to-XML decoder on your client side. This is probably the easiest approach but the least efficient.
As you can see, this is not an easy project, but you can get started with the Socket.BeginSend examples here and here, and the SocketAsyncEventArgs example here
Other Tips:
You can improve the reliability of your communication by having the client maintain two connections to the server for redundancy purposes. The reason being that TCP connections take a while to establish, so if one fails, you can still receive data from the other one while the client attempts to reconnect the failed connection.
You can look into using TCPClient class for the client implementation, since it's mostly reading a stream from a network connection.
What about rendezvous or 29 west? It would save reinventing the wheel. Dunno about amqp or zeromq they might work fine too....

Server Push vs Client Pull for Agent-Server Topology

I need to create a system comprising of 2 components:
A single server that process and stores data. It also periodically sends out updates to the agents
Multiple agents that are installed at remote endpoints. These collect data in (often, but not always) long-running operations, and this data needs to get to the server
I'm using C# .NET, and ideally I want to use a standards compliant communications method (i.e. one that could theoritically work with Java too, as we may well also use Java agents in the future). Are there any alternatives to web services? What are my options?
The way I see it I have 3 options using web services, and have made the following observations:
Client pull
No open port required at the agent, as it acts like a client
Would need to poll the server for updates
Server push
Open port at the agent, as it acts like a server
Server must poll agents for results
Hybrid
Open port at the agent, as it acts like both a client and a server
No polling; server pushes out updates when required, client sends results when they are available
The 'hybrid' (where agents are both client and server seems the obvious choice - but this application will typically be installed in enterprise and government environments, and I'm concerned they may have an issue with opening a port at the agent. Am I dwelling too much on this?
Are there any other pros and cons I've missed out?
Our friends at http://www.infrastructures.org swear by pull-based mechanisms: http://www.infrastructures.org/papers/bootstrap/bootstrap.html
A major reason why they prefer client-pull over server-push is that clients may be down, and clients must (in general) apply all the operations pushed by servers. If this criteria isn't important in your case, perhaps their conclusion won't be your conclusion, but I do think it is worth reading the "Push vs Pull" section of their paper to determine for yourself.
I would say that in this day and age you can seriously consider only pull technologies. The problem with push is that clients often are hidden behind Network Address Traversal devices (NAT) like wireless routers, broadband modems or company firewalls and they are, more often than not, unreachable from the server.
Making outbound connections ('phone-home'), specially on well known ports like HTTP/HTTPS can basically be assumed as 'possible' even under most constricted networks.
If you use some kind of messaging server (JMS for Java, not sure for C#) then your messaging server is the only server that needs to open a port and you can have two way communication from your agent to the messaging server and from the server to the messaging server. This would allow you to accomplish the hybrid model without needing to open a port on the agent server.
IMHO, I find your best option is the pull option.. that can satisfy your main system requirements as follow:
The first part: Data needs to get to the server, that's obviously can be done through invoking a web method that send that data as a parameter
2nd part:(Server periodically sends out updates to the agents): You can still do that that thru client (regular) pulls by some sort of a web service method that "asks" for the updates since its last pull (some sort of s time stamp to get the updates it missed)
The hybrid method seems a bit weird to me given that I think of an agent as a part of the system that probably might go "offline" quite often, what will the server then do if that failed? it's usually a tough question/decision, specially if you're not sure if this an intended "going offline" or a system/network failure.. etc

How would you notifiy clients about changed data on the server using .Net 2.0?

Imagine a WinForms client app that displays fairly complex calculated data fetched from a server app with .Net Remoting over a HTTPChannel.
Since the client app might be running for a whole workday, I need a method to notify the client that new data is available so the user is able to start a reload of the data when he needs to.
Currently I am using remoted .Net events, serializing the event to the client and then rethrowing the event on the side of the client.
I am not very happy with this setup and plan to reimplement it.
Important for me is:
.Net 2.0 based technology
easy of use
low complexity
robust enough to survive a server or client restart still functional
When limited to .Net 2.0, how would you implement such a feature? What technologies / libraries would you use?
I am looking for inspiration on how to attack the problem.
Edit:
The client and server exist in the same organisation, typically a LAN, perhaps a WAN/VPN situation.
This mechanism should only make the client aware that there is new data available. I'd like to keep remoting for getting the actual data to the client since that is working pretty well. MSMQ comes with windows, doesn't it? So it should be ok to use it, but I'm open to any alternative.
I've implemented a similar notification mechanism using MSMQ. The client machine opens a local, public queue, and then advises the server of it's queue name. When changes occur, the server pushes notifications into all the client queues that it's be made aware of. This way the client will know that data is ready, even if it wasn't running when the notification was sent.
The only downside is that it requires MSMQ on the clients, so this may not work if you don't have that kind of control over your client's machines.
For an extra level of redundancy (for example, if a client machine is completely down, and therefore the client queue is unavailable) you could queue notifications on the server prior to dissemination to clients. Notifications in the server queues are only removed when the client is successfully contacted (or perhaps after 3 failed attempts, etc.)
Also in that regard, if the server fails to deliver messages to a client a measured number of times, over a measured period of time, then support entities are notified, error alerts go out, and the client queue is removed from the list of destinations. When I say "measured" I mean a frequency/duration that makes sense to the setting. In my case, it was 5 retries with 5 minute intervals between attempts.
It might also make sense to have the client "renew" it's notification subscription at intervals. If a renewal doesn't occur, then eventually the client queue is removed from the destination list by a "groomer" process in the service.
It sounds as though you need to implement a message-queue based solution. Easy to implement, can survive reboots, and the technology is mature both on the server (MSMQ, MGQSeries) and on the client (System.Messaging)
If you can't find anything built-in and assuming you know the address of all the clients, you could send them a UDP message when data changes. Using UdpClient, this is very easy. The datagram doesn't even need to contain any data if the client app can assume that any UDP data on a certain port means it needs to get new data from the server.
If necessary, you can even make this a broadcast packet (if you don't know who the clients are and they are on the same subnet as the server), so long as the server isn't too "chatty".
Whatever solution you decide on, I would urge you to avoid having the clients poll. This will create a lot of unecessary network traffic and still won't perform all that well.
I would usually use a UI timer on the client to periodically hit the server to see if there was new or updated data. (Assuming you have a mechanism to identify that you have new data like time stamps for new rows, or file time stamps, or a table with last-calculated dates, etc)
That way the server doesn't have to know about the clients. The clients can check at their leisure, etc.

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