POSIX message queues or unix domain sockets for local IPC

Question

I need to configure local IPC between client and server. This is the case of a single server and multiple clients, and data needs to be exchanged in both directions. A client is a command that sends command parameters, and the server retrieves the data and sends it to the client. The client prints the output received from the server to the console.

The data sent from the command is small, but the data sent by the server to the command is huge (~ 11 Mb). The existing window design sends data to pieces of 65 kilobytes using named pipes. The server needs to send data to several commands at the same time, since they usually execute commands with different parameters simultaneously from different terminals.

I left FIFO, as data from several processes can be interleaved for messages larger than 4096 bytes. Please correct me if I am wrong.

Given the two criteria below, which would be the best choice, POSIX message queues or unix domain sockets?

• message size (65K)
• Data from multiple clients should not be interleaved. The client should only receive data addressed to this client.

Please let me know if you need more information.

Regards, Rohini Chandra

Answer 1

Looks like you want a socket. Configure the socket on the server using bind, and then when each client connects to it, the server can either fork each client individually, or use select to process the clients. Viking is usually simpler:

int sock = create and bind the socket to any port while (1) { int client = accept(sock); pid_t pid = fork() if (pid == 0) { // Handle client command exit(0); } }