CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#iossocketsxamarin.iosasyncsocket
Dermot
Dermot

Reputation: 1743

Increase ThreadPool thread count in Monotouch?

I have written my network code for my app using Sockets. I've tested the library on a windows PC and it is very fast. Whether it's many small "packets" (by packets I mean send operations, I am using TCP which is streaming) of data in a small amount of time, or a few large ones, it works perfectly.

I moved the code into a test app for the iPhone. Ran the test, great speeds again. about 5 MB sent over wifi between two phones in about 3 seconds.

Im using synchronous Socket.Send() operations in a threadpool thread, and using ReceiveAsync() for receiving. (I've also tried the BeginReceive() style, but it behaves the same.

However, once I move the code into my app, I start to encounter problems. The general problem is that the receiving app doesnt seem to receive consistently. I could send several "packets" of data from the host phone, and it can be anywhere from instantly, to a few seconds to 10 minutes before they appear on the receiving end. I've been on this problem for 2 weeks now (evenings/weekends) and i've spent days testing it to try understand exactly what I can do to reproduce it, but its never the same twice.

At the moment, im putting it down to threadpool threads being exhausted. I've used

ThreadPool.SetMaxThreads()

to increase the thread count drastically, but it doesnt make any difference. Its like as if the completed callback in SocketAsyncEventArgs cannot get a thread to operate on, so it just sits there. I've gone through my code and refactored anything that was un-necessarily using threads with a loop performing periodic tasks and changed them to timers, but the problem remains.

I have literally no idea where to turn with this one. Im hoping its maybe a bug in Monotouch (not that Im trying to blame those guys!).

Im not sure what code to post, as the network code has been tested on its own and operates fine. I've tested it with 1,000,000 send/receives to check if there was some kind of leak but found no problems.

It seems like the data is getting to the recipient, but the callback is somehow getting severely delayed in getting called, sometimes by several minutes.

Can anyone point me in a direction of why this might be happening?

Thank you.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 631

Answers (1)

Dermot
Dermot

Reputation: 1743

My problem with this was caused by having a GKSession also initialized. I hope this is a bug in Monotouch/Mono that can be fixed, as I do need both network features enabled. As soon as i disabled the GKSession, the socket code flows freely.

Upvotes: 2

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