I wouldn't recommended using that for production code anyways. It will be difficult
to deal with poorly behaved clients. You can set sig pipe to ignore for aborted
connections but you have no way to reliably implement timeouts for idle connections.
-J
--
On Wed, 22 Jan 2003, Nick Djurovich wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I want to create a multi-threaded SMTP server. I'm using
> Net::SMTP::Server as a base and thought it would be fairly
> trivial to make a multi-threaded server that would spawn
> threads for each incoming connection.
>
> Initially I used (please forgive any inaccuracies, i'm
> typing code from memory) ;
>
> -----------------------------------------------------
> my $server = new Net::SMTP::Server( 'localhost', '25' );
>
> while ( my $conn = $server->accept() )
> {
> my $thr = new threads( \&HandleConnection );
> $thr->detach;
> }
>
> sub HandleConnection
> {
> my $conn = shift;
> <code to handle connection>
> }
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
> This worked okay. But since the HandleConnection doesn't
> actually do anything intensive (accepts email and stores
> it as a file) and, I read, that there's quite an overhead
> in creating threads, that perhaps this wasn't the optimum
> way of doing it (ie time to create thread is large
> comparative to thread life time).
>
> I thought of changing it such that 10 threads would be
> created immediately, and then these threads would then
> handle the connections as they came in.
>
> The problem I have had, is once the thread is created,
> I cannot *seem* to pass the $conn object.
>
> I tried using threads::shared, I also tried using
> Thread::Queue, but both fail with the same error,
> something along the lines of 'Invalid value assigned
> to shared scalar'.
>
> It's basically complaining that I cannot assign this
> object instance to a scalar. When I use numbers on
> the shared scalar, or enqueue, dequeue numbers on
> the Queue it's no problem (just like the examples :).
>
> It doesn't seem to like sharing anything but simple
> data (I am hoping i'm wrong here. btw the docs only
> show simple data being shared).
>
> At this point, I started trying anything :), and the
> solution that seems to work, looks like it shouldn't.
>
> What I did was :
>
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
> my $server = new Net::SMTP::Server( 'localhost', '25' );
>
> foreach (1..10)
> {
> my $thr = new threads ( \&ClientWorker, $server );
> $thr->detach;
> }
>
> sub ClientWorker
> {
> my $server = shift;
> while (my $conn = $server->accept())
> {
> HandleConnection( $conn );
> }
> }
>
> sub HandleConnection
> {
> my $conn = shift;
> <code to handle connection>
> }
> -----------------------------------------------------
>
> So basically all 10 threads are waiting to accept a
> connection on the socket. I think it's okay, because
> I basically wrote an email spammer and ran it in 3
> separate shells to bombard it with connections.
>
> It doesn't look like it should work because there's no
> locking/blocking on $server.
>
> Questions :
>
> 1) How can I pass an object to a thread (AFTER it
> has been created).
> 2) Is my last code implementation flawed
>
> Regards
>
> Nick
>
>
>
