As the recent spate of bug fix and patch releases shows I’m not scared of talking about the bugs that I find in the code of The Server Framework and pushing fixes out quickly. It’s my belief that the most important thing to get out of a bug report is an improved process which will help prevent similar bugs from occurring in future and the only way to achieve that is to be open about the bugs you find and equally open about how you then address them and try and prevent similar issues.
I’ve been improving my pre-release testing system and now run a lock inversion detector as part of my build machine’s build and test cycle for the socket server examples. This lock inversion detector can detect the potential to deadlock without the code ever needing to actually deadlock, so it’s a pretty powerful tool. It has detected a lock inversion in the async connectors used by the OpenSSL, SChannel and SSPI Negotiate libraries.
As I mentioned last time, supporting a large number of concurrent connections on a modern Windows operating system is reasonably straight forward if you get your initial design right; use an I/O Completion Port based design, minimise context switches, data copies and memory allocation and avoid lock contention… The Server Framework gives you this as a starting point and you can often use one of the many, complete and fully functionaly, real world example servers to provide you with a whole server shell, complete with easy performance monitoring and SSL security, where you simply have to fill in your business logic.
As I mentioned in the release notes for v6.3 here, I’ve added some code to prevent potential recursion issues if certain performance improvements are enabled.
In Windows Vista and later it’s possible to set the FILE_SKIP_COMPLETION_PORT_ON_SUCCESS flag on a socket using SetFileCompletionNotificationModes(). When this flag is set an overlapped operation can complete “in-line” and the completion operation can be handled on the thread that issued the operation rather than on one of the threads that is servicing the IO completion port that is associated with the socket.
