Hi.. i dont have the book but it sounds like your using a "blocking" socket..

there are 2 ways (well 3 ways in Windows 2000 +) to implement sockets ..

Blocking - everything they do blocks execution on the thread untill it compleats (Accept calls, Write, Read etc)

Non-Blocking - This is the Async way.. basically windows sends a message to your app when the opperation is complete

Pros n Cons (note there was another thread on this blocking or non-blocking) :

non-blocking.. easy because you can have all sockets on 1 thread but windows Does limit the number of sockets you can reliably have on a single thread (64 i believe)

Blocking.. You will need a seperate thread for each socket so when they block the other threads continue ;-) the prob here is when you have 100''s of threads running windows starts to get less responcive because its haveing to switch between so many thread :-/

the best (windows 2000 + only) solution then is IO Completion ports which again has discussed before recently ;-)

hope thats helped and im not just rambling (as always)

~tim

Just one little correction Wrathgame.

I/O completion ports have been available since Windows NT 3.51



Dire Wolf
www.digitalfiends.com

I know this thread is old, but something does need correction.

Even if you''re using blocking sockets, you won''t need one thread per socket. That''s exactly what select() and poll() are for. Of course, techniques like I/O completion ports and RT signals scale better to huge connection counts, as we''ve discussed in detail in a different thread
If you can''t use any of those techniques tho (i.e. on Win9x, non-patched Linux, ...), using select() is probably a lot more efficient than using threads in most cases.

cu,
Prefect

One line of sourcecode says more than a thousand words.