Named pipes: Many clients. How to be prudent with thread creation? Thread Pool?

On Windows, the most efficient way to build a concurrent server is to use an asynch model with completion ports. But yes you can use a thread pool and use blocking i/o too, as that is a simpler programming abstraction.

On Windows, the most efficient way to build a concurrent server is to use an asynch model with completion ports. But yes you can use a thread pool and use blocking i/o too, as that is a simpler programming abstraction. Vista/Windows 2008 provide a thread pool abstraction.

Thank you for your recommendation - I/O completion ports look promising. I will read more about it. (I'm targeting XP and above).

– moog Aug 12 '10 at 8:06.

I wrote a named pipe server today using IOCompletion ports just to see how. The basic logic flow was: I created the first named pipe via CreateNamedPipe I created the main Io Completion Port object using that handle: CreateIoCompletionPort I create a pool of worker threads - as a thumb suck, CPUs x2. Each worker thread calls GetQueuedCompletionStatus in a loop.

Then called ConnectNamedPipe passing in an overlapped structure. When this pipe connects, one of the GetQueuedCompletionStatus calls will return. My main thread then joins the pool of workers by also calling GetQueuedCompletionStatus.

Thats about it really. Each time a thread returns from GetQueuedCompletionStatus its because the associated pipe has been connected, has read data, or has been closed. Each time a pipe is connected, I immediately create a unconnected pipe to accept the next client (should probably have more than one waiting at a time) and call ReadFile on the current pipe, passing an overlapped structure - ensuring that as data arrives GetQueuedCompletionStatus will tell me about it.

There are a couple of irritating edge cases where functions return a fail code, but GetLastError() is a success. Because the function "failed" you have to handle the success immediately as no queued completion status was posted. Conversely, (and I belive Vista adds an API to "fix" this) if data is available immediately, the overlapped functions can return success, but a queued completion status is ALSO posted so be careful not to double handle data in that case.

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