quote:Original post by Anonymous Poster
If you''re on the client, make your sockets non-blocking, and read them all each frame. There''s very little overhead in reading a nonblocking socket that has no data.

For servers, write a single thread, and have it select() over all sockets, reading from all the sockets that have data (they should still be non-blocking).

This is not only very efficient (both for client and server); it also ports very easily to UNIX.

Multi-threading is almost never worth it for something with as much inter-dependence as a game; the locking overhead will kill you.

quote:Original post by Prefect
quack, that's nonsense.

What the AP suggested is: One thread that polls the socket directly.

What you suggested is: One thread that reads from the socket and posts into a queue. One thread that polls the queue directly.

You don't gain _anything_ by doing what you suggested. In fact, your suggestion is worse in every way. It requires more resources, makes the code bigger introducing potential bugs and increases latency problems (because of scheduling between the two threads).

cu,
Prefect