I'm developing a simple Client-Server application over socket, but I can't get why client freezes when he is reading an object.
Server must be capable of dealing with multiple client.
Keeping it simple, my Server looks like:
...
server_thread = new Thread(new Runnable() {
#Override
public void run() {
int p = 0;
ObjectInputStream in;
ObjectOutputStream out;
NetworkOffer message;
try (ServerSocket serverSocket = new ServerSocket(port)) {
// get connections
LinkedList<Socket> client_sockets = new LinkedList<>();
while (p++ < partecipants) client_sockets.add(serverSocket.accept());
// sending welcome object
for (Socket socket : client_sockets) {
out = new ObjectOutputStream(socket.getOutputStream());
message = new NetworkOffer();
out.writeObject(buyer_offer);
}
...
My Client:
...
client_thread = new Thread(new Runnable() {
#Override
public void run() {
ObjectInputStream in;
NetworkOffer smessage;
try {
Socket ssocket = new Socket("localhost", port);
in = new ObjectInputStream(ssocket.getInputStream());
// waiting server message
------------->Object o = in.readObject();
smessage = (NetworkOffer)o;
System.out.println(smessage.toString());
...
EDIT:
To make things clearer, this is the protocol I want to implement:
N clients connect to Server
Server send welcome to Clients
Every client makes an offer
Server chooses best offer, and sends a message to each Client with Accept/Reject
If there isn't an acceptable offer goto 3.
Client sticks on Object o = in.readObject(); even if server has already sent his message.
No error, nothing. Thread is simply freezed there waiting for something.
What's going on?
The problem is ServerSocket.accept() is a blocking call meaning the server will hang until somebody connects to it. When somebody connects, the server will add that new socket to the client_sockets. If the number of sockets added is less than participants, it will then call accept() again and wait for another connection. It will only enter your for loop when the total number of sockets is equal to participants. You need to spawn a new thread to handle each incoming client socket and allow the server to return immediately to ServerSocket.accept(). Have a look at the Reactor pattern for a good example of how to implement this.
What your code should look like is this:
Server waits for connections.
When client connects, spawn a new thread to handle the connection.
Server returns to waiting for connections.
New thread sends welcome message on socket, adds the socket to the list of client_sockets and waits for the clients offer.
Store the clients offer.
When all offers have been received, compare to find the best.
Send Accept/Reject messages.
As I said before: are you sure that the server have sent the data to the client - there is no buffer flush so it can still be cached.
out.flush() will make sure that buffer is flushed.
It will make sense to handle clients separately and send them periodic messages to update them about the status.
It is useful for your server code to handle the client disconnect/connection drop too.
On the side note:
message = new NetworkOffer();
out.writeObject(buyer_offer);
Your code seems to be sending something else that is not present in your example. Is that correct?
Related
I'm new at network programming and i have been searching for a solution to my problem here but couldn't find one. What I want is to have a server that can receive files from multiple sockets at the same time. When a server accepts new connection socket it wraps that socket with a ClientThread class. Here is the code:
public class Server extends Thread {
private ServerSocket server;
private Vector<ClientThread> clients;
#Override
public void run() {
listen();
}
private void listen() {
new Thread("Listening Thread") {
#Override
public void run() {
while (true) {
try {
Socket socket = server.accept();
ClientThread newClient = new ClientThread(socket);
newClient.start();
clients.addElement(newClient);
} catch (IOException | ClassNotFoundException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
}.start();
}
ClientThread is a private class inside the Server class. It's always listening for an Object from ObjectInputStream, but also I want to be able to receive one big file after the object. And that is why I think i should use multithreading. Here is the code:
private class ClientThread extends Thread {
public Socket socket;
private boolean loggedIn;
private ObjectInputStream ois;
private BufferedInputStream bis;
public ClientThread(Socket socket) {
this.socket = socket;
loggedIn = true;
InputStream is = socket.getInputStream();
ois = new ObjectInputStream(is);
bis = new BufferedInputStream(is);
}
#Override
public void run() {
receive();
}
private void receive() {
while (loggedIn) {
try {
// this method blocks i guess
Object object = ois.readObject();
// after the object comes the large file
byte[] bytes = new byte[SOME_SIZE];
int bytesRead;
int totalRead = 0;
// reading the large file into memory
while ((bytesRead = bis.read(bytes, totalRead, bytes.length - totalRead)) > -1) {
totalRead += bytesRead;
}
// rest of the code for handling received bytes.......
} catch (ClassNotFoundException | IOException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
}
I'm not sure if receiving data like this is even possible since all these client sockets are sending data to the same port on this server (i guess?). And if clients are sending data at the same time, Server needs to know which data is for which client. Is this already taken care of, or i need entirely different approach here?
I don't know if this is a stupid question, but like I said I'm just starting learning this stuff. Also i couldn't test my program because i don't even have code for the Client yet. Just want to make sure I don't go wrong at the very start. If this is wrong, feel free to post some ideas. :) Thanks!
For a start it's not bad :)
You can improve later on by using a Selector but that's another topic.
Some clarifications though: the ServerSocket listens on a specific port. When a remote client connects to it, a communication channel (i.e. socket) is created. If another client connects, another socket is created. Both sockets are different channels and won't interfere with each other because they are connected to a different remote IP and port.
It all has to do with how TCP headers and IP headers are formed: a TCP data packet is sent with its header containing the source and destination port, on top of IP header containing the source and destination IP. Those are used to discriminate between the different sockets.
Regarding the "broadcast" you want to do (as per your comment in #Rajesh's answer), you have options:
Do it yourself in pure TCP with ServerSocket and Socket like you started
Switch to UDP and use MulticastSocket, which has the advantage of issueing a single send, but you'll have to deal with missing/unordered datagrams in your client code (UDP does not guarantee delivery or ordering, like TCP does)
Check NIO with Selector and SocketChannel
Investigate frameworks like jGroups or Netty which do the I/O stuff for you
As you're learning, I suggest you do that in the above order. Using a framework is nice, but going through coding yourself will teach you a lot more.
This will work functionally. Each thread is reading from a separate socket connected to different client (address + port). They are separate streams, so no issues in reading from that like this.
However it would be much better to use asynchronous sockets.
Few things that can be taken care in the current implementation:
1) As a good practice, close the streams/sockets when transfer is complete.
2) For every new connection, a new thread is created. That will not scale. Even some one can send many requests and bring down your app. Would be better to use a thread pool. "ClientThread" can just implement "Runnable" and when a new connection is received, just submit the new "ClientThread" to thread pool. (In this case, would be better to name it as ClientTask instead of ClientThread)
As mentioned, it would be much more efficient and scalable to use asynchronous socket, but it will take some time master it. With this, you can use just one thread to read all sockets in parallel and depending on load, can use the same thread or a pool of threads to process the data received from all the sockets. Note that, even if use a pool, you will not need separate thread for processing each socket...Just to make best use of multiple CPU Cores, can use multiple threads to process the data.
You may try either java nio (Selector + SocketChannels) or netty library. Netty is much easier to use compared to nio.
I am writing client/server application in which multiple clients connect to servers and continiusly send serialized objects to servers at a high rate over TCP connection.
I am using ObjectOutputStream.writeObject on client and ObjectInputStream.readObject at server.
Server application accepts clients connection on the single port using serverSocket.accept() and passes Socket to a new thread for reading objects.
When a single client connects and sends about 25K objects/s - all works fine. Once I start a second client, after the short period of time, one or both clients hang on ObjectOutputStream.writeObject for one of the servers and the corresponding server hangs on the ObjectInputStream.readObject.
No exceptions thrown on the both sides.
If rate is very low, lets say 10-20/s in total - it will not hang but at 100-1000/s it will.
Using netstat -an on the client machine I can see that the send-Q of the corresponding link is about 30K. On the server side the receive-Q is also ~30K.
When running client/server on the local Windows I observe something similar - client hangs but the server continue to process incoming objects and once it catches up, client unlocks and continue to send objects.
Locally on windows the server is slower than client, but on linux, number of the server instances running on the deferent machines is more than enough for the rate that clients produce.
Any clue what is going on?
client code snip:
Socket socket = new Socket(address, port);
ObjectOutputStream outputStream = new ObjectOutputStream(socket.getOutputStream());
while(true)
{
IMessage msg = createMsg();
outputStream.writeObject(msg);
outputStream.flush();
outputStream.reset();
}
server code accepting connections:
while(active)
{
Socket socket = serverSocket.accept();
SocketThread socketThread = new SocketThread(socket);
socketThread.setDaemon(true);
socketThread.start();
}
server code reading objects:
public class SocketThread extends Thread
{
Socket socket;
public SocketThread(Socket socket)
{
this.socket = socket;
}
#Override
public void run() {
try {
ObjectInputStream inStream = new ObjectInputStream(socket.getInputStream());
while(true)
{
IMessage msg = (IMessage)inStream.readObject();
if(msg == null){
continue;
}
List<IMessageHandler> handlers = handlersMap.get(msg.getClass());
for(IMessageHandler handler : handlers){
handler.onMessage(msg);
}
}
} catch (IOException | ClassNotFoundException e) {
e.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
You have just described the operation of TCP when the sender outruns the receiver. The receiver tells the sender to stop sending, so the sender stops sending. As you are using blocking I/O, the client blocks in send() internally.
There is no problem here to solve.
The problem was that handlers on the server side were using some not thread-safe resources (like Jedis connection) so it was all stack on the server side.
Doing it thread safe solved the issue.
I'm in the process of writing a messaging program, and I'm running into a spot where I'm having trouble understanding how to pass a socket over to a new thread for handling outbound messages via TCP. I'm currently using UDP packets for messages coming from a client, to the server, which, being UDP, doesn't require very much processing, as it's simply listening for incoming packets, before it de-serializes the objects, and processes them as needed in a separate thread. My problem now is, I'm setting up a client initiated TCP socket for reverse traffic, from the server to the assorted clients that connect. I've done a bit of research, and I already understood that each client should have their own thread for handling outgoing messages, along with another thread simply for accepting the incoming connections. I'm unsure of how to actually achieve this, and I've done some research into the topic.
I've found this: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/networking/sockets/clientServer.html
The resource above basically verified my original suspicion that this would have to be handled by threads dedicated to the client. They included psuedo code here, which is representing my listener thread.
while (true) {
accept a connection;
create a thread to deal with the client;
}
I'm a bit of a visual learner, and I have been searching for some type of an example where this is done. I'm unsure of what variable I'd be passing over to the thread that keeps the original connection open, and pushes data back to clients. I'm also having a little bit of trouble grasping whether it even keeps the same socket open, or if a new one needs to be established, which then, makes me believe a firewall could interfere, but I know that won't be the case.
Can somebody explain this for me in detail? If possible, an example would be greatly appreciated!
I'll be likely replying and commenting on responses in about 15-30 minutes from the time this is posted.
What you are doing sounds correct. I typically implement a server like this (simplified version with no tracking of the clients and so on):
#Override
public void run() {
//start listening on the port
try {
serverSocket = new ServerSocket(port);
logger.info("Listening for connections on port " + port);
} catch (IOException e) {
logger.error("Cannot start SocketListener on port " + port + ". Stopping.", e);
return;
}
while (!stopped) {
try {
//wait for connection
Socket newSocket = serverSocket.accept();
ClientThread client = new ClientThread(newSocket);
Thread clientThread = new Thread(client, MEANINGFUL_THREAD_ID);
clientThread.start();
} catch ...
}
}
where serverSocket is a ServerSocket instance variable and stopped is a flag I use to stop the listener thread.
So to answer your questions in the comment, you normally pass the Socket object to each client thread so that that thread can work with the input and output stream and handle closing of the socket and so on. Once you "accept" a socket connection, you do not need to recreate the ServerSocket, you simply call .accept() again to start waiting for a new connection.
In most cases, you will need to keep track of all client threads in your server so that you can stop the server gracefully or do broadcasts for example.
I've written a java intake program that send an PDF-formatted intake to a shared folder so that other people in the network can read it. However, there is not a way for the other people to know that an intake was sent unless someone tells them, so I want the program to send an alert message to the other computers telling them that an intake has been sent.
Now I've done some research into this and figured that TCP is the way to go since it's reliable. I also know that this is a one-to-many sending going on, so I assume that my Intake program will act as the server an the other computers will be the client, or should it be the other way around?
Now I assume that I have to create a client program that listens to the server and waits for it to send a message.
With that in mind, how do I:
Create a client program that listens for the message continuously until the program is closed. I assume that I'll be using "while (true)" and sleep. If so, how long do I put the program to sleep?
Make it as part of Windows service so that can load up when Windows start.
On the server end, how do I:
Send messages to more than one computer, since TCP is not capable of multicasting or broadcasting. I assume an array/vector will play a part here.
Oh, this is a one-way communication. The client doesn't have to respond back to the server.
First of all, UDP is quite reliable (in fact, as reliable as the IP protocol itself). TCP simply ensures that the data was received which involved quite a lot of magic in the back end. Unless you absolutely need to be sure that other machines got the message, you could do it with UDP. Mind that I'm not saying “Don't use TCP”, I just want to make it straight that you should take UDP into consideration as well.
Anyway, yes, you can create a simple listening program. Here is an example of a client in Java that reads messages from the server. It overrides the run method of a Thread class:
public void run() {
try {
String messageFromServer = reader.readLine();
while (messageFromServer != null) {
// Do things with messageFromServer here
// processor.processFromServer(messageFromServer);
messageFromServer = reader.readLine(); // Blocks the loop, waits for message
}
}
catch (IOException e) {
// Handle your exception
}
}
Amongst other things, my thread was set up as such:
public CommunicationThread(String hostname, int port, int timeout) throws IOException, SocketTimeoutException {
InetSocketAddress address = new InetSocketAddress(hostname, port);
socket = new Socket();
socket.connect(address, 2000); // 2000ms time out
// You can use the writer to write messages back out to the server
writer = new BufferedWriter(new OutputStreamWriter(socket.getOutputStream()));
reader = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(socket.getInputStream()));
}
Now, regards to server-side you can do something as follows:
Write a program to allow clients to contact, given that they know your address.
Accept the connections, and store the sockets in a list.
When you need to send out a message, traverse the list and send the data to everyone on it.
You can start listening on your server with
this.socket = new ServerSocket(port);
You could (or even should(?)) make it threaded so that you can accept clients while serving others. You can accept new clients with:
socket.accept(); // Blocks, waiting for someone to connect, returns open socket
Feel free to pass that to a whole new class which can deal with BufferedWriter (and maybe even BufferedReader if you want to read from clients as well). That class is where you would implement things such as writeToClient(message)
Consider the situation where you have a ClientConnection class that has writeToClient(String s) method and (Server server, Socket socket) and initialized ArrayList conList.
Here is how you would follow:
In a separate thread in Server, accept connections with
ClientConnection con = new ClientConnection(this, socket.accept());
conList.add(con);
Then, when you want to write to clients:
for (ClientConnection c : conList) {
c.writeToClient("I'm sending you a message!");
}
I hope you get a vague idea of what you need to do. Read the Socket documentation, it's very useful. Also, as always with threaded applications, make sure you aren't doing things such as modifying a list while traversing it and avoid race conditions.
Good luck!
I'm working on a game with a event based structure with the main game logic hosted on a server; currently it's a very small featureset that only allows to host one game between exactly two participants. I've read on various questions about ServerSocket and none of them answers my question. I already took a look at
ServerSocket accept continues to block
ServerSocket.accept()
Java ServerSocket won't accept new connections until close() is called on the accepted socket
ServerSocket accept() method
In my project I utilize ObjectInputStream and ObjectOutputStream. Everything works as expected (receiving / sending both on server and client side), but after both sockets are registered, the accept method of the ServerSocket instance continues to block forever, even if the same code is invoked before. Perhaps it's an issue that appears after communicating over a socket once?
My server log shows the following:
waiting for accept
accepting first socket
sending an event to socket1 for informing about waiting for the opponent
waiting for accept
accept second socket
sending responses to both sockets
waiting for accept (and blocking forever)
When the log says response events where sent, they were properly received and processed at the client side. The client side debug outputs show that the next event is definitely sent. Maybe it's about not closing the client sockets (mentioned in the third linked question)? Anyway I can't close the client sockets because further communication would be impossible.
Client side code
public void send(Event e) {
try {
ObjectOutputStream out = new ObjectOutputStream(
socket.getOutputStream());
out.writeObject(e);
out.flush();
log.debug("sending event... "+e);
}
catch(IOException ioe) {
log.fatal("constructing oos failed", ioe);
}
}
Server side code
#Override
public void run() {
running = true;
while(running) {
try {
Socket s = socket.accept();
ObjectInputStream ois = new ObjectInputStream(s.getInputStream());
Event event = (Event) ois.readObject();
try {
Event[] response = controller.consume(event);
ObjectOutputStream oos = new ObjectOutputStream(sockets[0].getOutputStream());
oos.writeObject(response[0]);
oos.flush();
ObjectOutputStream oos2 = new ObjectOutputStream(sockets[1].getOutputStream());
oos2.writeObject(response[1]);
oos2.flush();
}
catch(...) {
// multiple catch clauses for different exceptions
// all just logging (nothing passes silently!)
}
}
}
For shortening, the method for assigning the two sockets to the Socket[] array was left out, but since there are no exceptions, keeping the socket works. Do you have any idea what could cause the described behavior? Thank you in advance.
The accept method only accepts new connections. Since you only have two clients attempting to connect to your server, it will hang indefinitely on your third invocation of accept.
Side note: You don't need to continuously create new ObjectInputStreams and ObjectOutputStreams. You can just create one of each for each Socket and keep references to them for reuse.