Re: [Boost-users] [interprocess] Many-to-many communication

From: Ion Gaztañaga (igaztanaga_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-02-27 15:13:58

Boris wrote:
> I have an application which needs to communicate with several other  
> applications on the same machine. I thought to use message queues but  
> quickly ran into a problem: Either I create as many threads as there are  
> message queues which all block and wait for incoming data or I constantly  
> poll all message queues. The later should be easily possible with  
> try_receive(). However it doesn't sound like a good idea to poll  
> continuously? And I assume integrating the message queue somehow into  
> Boost.Asio is not something easily possible? Thus for many-to-many  
> communication shared memory is probably the way to go?

I'm sorry to tell you that the integration between ASIO and Interprocess 
is not easy. Since many times (nearly always) the OS does not offer this 
notification mechanism to trigger asynchronous notifications, polling 
would be the only choice for a ASIO plug-in.

Maybe in some systems with native process-shared semaphores, we could 
put a thread blocked in that semaphore so that once a message is written 
the thread notifies ASIO machinery. Although I'm afraid that this idea 
would take a long time to be implemented.

Regards,

Ion