On Die, 2013-07-02 at 20:38 +0200, Antoine Villeret wrote:
Hi roman,
the code around networking object are some workarounds for differents bugs, the first was a crash when client number reach 32, but it seems to be fixed, I can't reproduce this anymore the second was something strange if several clients connect to the same server at the same time (when patch launch for example), so I add a timeout, if no answer in this timeout, the client disconnect there is also a mechanism to choose an available port at startup in server and the client try different port until it get a connection...
Ok, I think I understand a bit more now.
The server tries a different port when the first port is not available right? It scans until it finds one. I don't see what the client is supposed to do. There is some code to scan through ports, but actually when I tested your client, it always only tried 10000.
I don't think that dynamic ports are a good solution. If you find a proper way to disconnect the clients, then you shouldn't experience the problem of a busy port when restarting the server. This only happens when you close the server patch without disconnecting the clients. Anyway, the port scanning of the clients would be so slow that probably by the time they found the correct port, the initial port would be free again (depending on OS, though).
Then I think your way of testing might expose bugs that you wouldn't experience in real life. I mean that is good for bug reporting, but it isn't really meaningful to connect many clients in the same instance of Pd, even less so to connect them all in zero logical time. If you would run your clients in different instances of Pd (what I think is your plan anyway), you wouldn't have to find workarounds for issues exposed by running clients in the same instance.
I figured you can only properly disconnect all clients with [net/tcpserver]. Unlike [iemnet/tcpserver], it has no 'disconnect' method. So you have to disconnect each client separately. [iemnet/tcpserver] is supposed to disconnect all clients with 'disconnect', but actually the [iemnet/tcpclient]s seem to ignore it and keep their connected state (outlet 3 doesn't switch to 0). Finishing sessions seems generally to be still a problem with iemnet. Also when a client disconnects, the server often doesn't change the number of connected clients. The net library seems much more robust in this regard.
I simplified your patches a lot and as simple as they are, they seem to work fine here. Note about the server: you need to disconnect all clients before you close the server patch. This will the leave the network socket in a clean state and you will be able to occupy that port immediately again. The client tries to connect at a rate of one try per second. In case it gets disconnected by the server, it waits 5 seconds before trying to connect again. This gives you time to disconnect all clients and shutdown the server properly.
all of this is quite complex for a not so difficult task : I want to make several instance of Pd talking to each other on one machine
I started with udpsend/udpreceive but I found no way to do broadcast on localhost
You mean broadcast on all ports? I don't think that something like that exists.
and I do need to have lots of clients multicasting is not a solution because it need to have a working networking interface
If you want to run many instances of Pd on localhost, then multicast can't help you. It is about sending data to many clients on different IPs at the same time. You want to send to many clients on localhost.
then I tried udpserver which doesn't work (at least the version in the pd's SVN) then I switch to tcpserver and I got a lots of troubles...
Things look good as long as you think you only need streams. As soon as you figure out that you need to send packets between your instances of Pd, things get really complex wit [tcpserver].
I will try out iohannes version of iemnet and I'll also investigate those bugs
As of today, both libraries net and iemnet have known bugs. My examples use net because [iemnet/tcpserver] can't disconnect clients.
but other (simpler) solutions are welcome :-)
See attachment. I tested them with Pd-extended 0.43.3 on Ubuntu 12.04
Roman