CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#performancesocketsasyncsocket
JamesT
JamesT

Reputation: 83

Improve C# Socket performance

We have a TCP Async socket game server written in C# serving many concurrent connections. Everything else works fine except for the problems below:

  1. Frequent disconnections for some users (Not all mind you)
  2. Degraded performance for users on slow connections

Most of the users who face this problem are using GSM connections (portable USB dongles based on CDMA) and often the signal strength is poor. So basically they have rather poor bandwidth. Perhaps under 1KB per sec.

My question: What can we do to make the connections more stable and improve performance even for the slower connections?

I am thinking dynamic TCP buffers on client and server side, but not really sure of the performance degradation due to overhead in dynamically doing this for each connection of my direction is even correct.

Max data packet size is under 1 KB.

Current TCP buffer size on server and client is 16KB

Any pointers or references on how to write stable anync socket code in C# for poor or slow connections would be a great help. Thanks in advance.

Upvotes: 2

Views: 1563

Answers (1)

Nikolai Fetissov
Nikolai Fetissov

Reputation: 84239

"Performance" is a very relative term. It looks like your main concern is with data transfer rates. Unfortunately you can't do much about it given low-bandwidth connections - maybe data compression can help, but actual effect depends on your data, and there's always a tradeoff between transfer rate improvement vs. compression/de-compression delays. There's also latency to consider for any sort of interactive game.

As @Pierre suggested in the comments you might consider UDP for the transport, but that only works if you can tolerate packet loss and re-ordering, and that again depends of the data and what you do with it.

Another approach I would suggest investigating is to provide two different quality-of-service modes. Clients on good links can use full functionality (say, full-resolution game images), while low-bandwidth clients would get reduced options (say, much smaller size low-quality images). You can measure initial round-trip times on client connect/handshake to select the mode.

Hope this helps a bit.

Upvotes: 2

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