I hinted at the end of the last post that the 6.7 release might increase performance a little. Well, whilst the bulk of the changes in 6.7 are purely code cleaning and the removal of legacy support there is a fairly major functional change as well.
In most situations references or pointers to I/O buffers have been replaced with smart pointers. This change may cause some issues during an upgrade as you need to change some function signatures from IBuffer refs to CSmartBuffers.
We’ve only just shipped Release 6.6.5 of The Server Framework but we already have another release that’s just about to ship. This isn’t because some horrible bug has slipped through our testing, it’s because we’ve been planning to produce a ‘clean up’ release for some time. 6.7 is that release.
Lets be straight here, 6.7 is a release for us more than for you. The aim is to simplify our build/test and release process, remove dead code whilst introducing no new bugs and removing no functionality that you rely on.
We have a new Option Pack, The Streaming Media Option Pack. This allows you to easily add streaming of H.264 and MPEG audio and video to your clients and servers using RTSP, RTP and RTCP.
With more and more Internet Of Things devices supporting rich media streaming for remote monitoring it’s becoming essential to have the ability to manage these media streams within your device management servers and clients. Whether it’s recording device streams for later analysis or arbitrating between multiple clients and devices, manipulating streaming media is becoming more and more important.
I don’t believe that UDP should require any flow control in the sending application. After all, it’s unreliable and it should be quite OK for any stage of the route from one peer to another to decide to drop a datagram for any reason. However, it seems that, on Window’s at least, no datagrams will be dropped between the application and the network interface card (NIC) driver, no matter how heavily you load the system.
Release 6.6 of The Server Framework includes some breaking changes to both the IService, IServiceCallbacks and IShutdownService interfaces. Many functions now return an ServiceTools::ExitCode, either directly or by value, which allows you to fine tune the exit code returned from your service under failure conditions. This exit code is reported to the Service Control Manager (SCM) when your service shuts down and also returned from the exe if you run the service as a normal exe.
Another performance improvement in the forthcoming 6.6 release is due to a change in our default choice for locking primitives on most platforms. Note that the perf improvement is small and, according to our testing, it doesn’t materialise on all hardware (though there’s no performance degradation seen).
The change is to switch from using CRITICAL_SECTION objects to using Slim Reader Writer Locks in exclusive (write) mode. You can read about the differences between these two locks in Kenny Kerr’s MSDN article here.
I’ve been working on a “big” new release for some time, too long actually. It has steadily been accumulating new features for over a year but the arrival of my second son in July last year and masses of client work has meant that it has repeatedly been pushed on the back burner. Well, no more, Release 6.6 is now in the final stages of development and testing (so I won’t be adding more new features) and hopefully will see a release in Q2
Some stream protocols have the concept of ‘out of band’ (OOB) data. This is a separate logical communication channel between the peers which enables data that is unrelated to the current data in the stream to be sent alongside the normal data stream. This is often a way for some data to jump ahead of the normal stream and arrive faster than if it were delivered via the the normal data stream.
Due to client demand we’re working on the WebSocket protocol again. Things have moved on since the work we did in December and this time the resulting option pack really will make it into the next release rather than simply being something that we tweak for each client that asks for it.
Back in December one of our gaming clients wanted WebSocket functionality in their game server so we did some work on the two versions of the spec that they wanted, the Hixie 76 draft and the HyBi 03 draft.
I’m in the process of completing a custom server development project for a client. The server deals with connections from thousands of embedded devices and allows them to download new firmware or configuration data and upload data that they’ve accumulated in their local memory. To enable maximum scalability the server use asynchronous reads and writes to the file system as well as the network.
One feature of the server is the ability to configure it to create per session log files.
