Introduction
This will be the first of a series of articles that help programmers create high performance network application serves that implement some common network application protocols and also some custom created ones to demonstrate the basic features in creating network application servers, all servers will be performance tested using locustio and sometimes compared with real world servers.
Also we will use our own clients to communicate with real servers and real clients to communicate with our servers to check for the correct operation of our own work, all programming will be done using C programming language with some clients created using python for testing in locustio framework.
Why C?
First C is definitely not a dying language as you might expect, C is still used in many software projects, the most notable project in C is the Linux Kernel with millions of lines of code written in C.
C is used for very high performance software that needs to take full advantage of the available hardware to increase its performance, it offers very little protection to its programmers in exchange for high performance, other programming languages offer a lot of protection which decreases performance, C is a compiled language that runs directly on hardware without using any virtual machines as Java does.
You can control many aspects of C programs such as the ability to store variables in CPU registers without storing them in memory which greatly increases performance of programs, the ability to inline some basic functions which removes the overhead of saving CPU registers when calling a function but at the same time enable programmers to use simple functions to do common tasks, in C you can access any memory location you want using pointers however trying to access memory locations outside program’s memory will cause a segmentation fault and stop the program.
If you wanted to use a high level programming language and at the same time get a high performance I recommend using golang from google, its creators — google — say it is as fast as C and as beautiful as Python, and many high performance software are already created using it such as caddy which is a high performance web server, kubernetes which is a docker orchestrator software.
Preparing the environment
To follow along with this article and the next ones you need the following:
- conan A package manager for C/C++ projects.
- cmake An open source, multi-platform build tool that can be used in C/C++ projects.
- A linux machine either virtual or physical, you can have any distribution you want, however here I will be using Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop.
- A text editor, it can be default gedit which comes with Ubuntu or the preferred atom editor.
We will get started by creating a very simple hello world C application with help from conan and cmake.
Hello World C program with conan and cmake
After conan and cmake are installed and ready for use create a new folder called sockets where you want to put your source code, and create these two directories inside it src and build along with these two files conanfile.txt and CMakeLists.txt .
. ├── build ├── CMakeLists.txt ├── conanfile.txt └── src 2 directories, 2 files The src directory will hold our program’s source code, build will contain generated binaries and libraries along with Makefiles for compiling source code to binary files.
The file conanfile.txt is an INI file that contains the names of packages our application depends on them, in this case our program does not depend on any external libraries or packages, and also a list of generators that create the right configuration file for cmake to work properly and link with used libraries.
The file CMakeLists.txt is a very basic configuration file for cmake that includes the conan generated file along with some instructions to create the binaries we need in our program, one for the server and the other for the client.
Start by creating a new file called main.c in src directory, with this content.
#include int main(int argc, char const *argv[]) printf("Hello world in C\n"); return 0; > This is a very basic program in C.
Now add this content to conanfile.txt
We specify a single generator called cmake , now change to the build directory and execute this command:
After this command you will see five new files in build directory, these files are autogenerated by conan, we do not need to touch or change these files at all, the most important one of them is conanbuildinfo.cmake if you open this file and look at its contents you will see a lot of cmake instructions that were generated by conan according to your configuration, if you did not use conan you would probably need to write many of these by hand, hard right?
Now let us get back to the other file called CMakeLists.txt it has the following content
cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 2.8.12) project(csockets) include($/conanbuildinfo.cmake) conan_basic_setup() add_executable(ctest src/main.c) target_link_libraries(ctest $) These are only 6 lines of code, that is better than the many lines found in conanbuildinfo.cmake and easier to use, we will explain each of these lines now:
- The first one specifies that we need at least version 2.8.12 of cmake to run this program.
- The second lines gives a name to the project csockets , it could be any name.
- The third line is very important one, here we include all the code in the file conanbuildinfo.cmake as if it was written here, perfect 🙂
- The fourth line calls the function conan_basic_setup which is defined in conanbuildinfo.cmake .
- The fifth line defines a new executable to be created with the name of ctest and created form the file src/main.c
- The last line makes sure that any libraries defined in conan are linked with the new executable so we can use them easily, for now we do not have libraries in conan but when we add them later they will be linked automatically.
Now inside the build directory execute this command:
Many new files and directories are created after the last command, we do not need to touch any of them, now to create the executable we defined earlier just execute this command
You will see a new file in the bin directory called ctest , if you try to execute this file you will get the desired output from the program you wrote earlier on, to execute use this command
If you make any changes to the source code just execute make to generate new binaries, if you change CMakeLists.txt file execute cmake .. for new changes to take effect, if you change conanfile.txt file execute this command conan install .. for new changes to take effect.
Now you have a simple program in C that is managed by conan and cmake easily, we will move to the part of creating an echo server and client.
Echo server
To create a server we need first to add these two lines to CMakeLists.txt file
add_executable(server src/server.c) target_link_libraries(server $) These instruct cmake to create an executable binary called sever for the file src/server.c and link any conan libraries with it.
The contents for src/server.c are as follows:
#include // perror, printf #include // exit, atoi #include // read, write, close #include // sockaddr_in, AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, INADDR_ANY, socket etc. #include // memset int main(int argc, char const *argv[]) int serverFd, clientFd; struct sockaddr_in server, client; int len; int port = 1234; char buffer[1024]; if (argc == 2) port = atoi(argv[1]); > serverFd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0); if (serverFd 0) perror("Cannot create socket"); exit(1); > server.sin_family = AF_INET; server.sin_addr.s_addr = INADDR_ANY; server.sin_port = htons(port); len = sizeof(server); if (bind(serverFd, (struct sockaddr *)&server, len) 0) perror("Cannot bind sokcet"); exit(2); > if (listen(serverFd, 10) 0) perror("Listen error"); exit(3); > while (1) len = sizeof(client); printf("waiting for clients\n"); if ((clientFd = accept(serverFd, (struct sockaddr *)&client, &len)) 0) perror("accept error"); exit(4); > char *client_ip = inet_ntoa(client.sin_addr); printf("Accepted new connection from a client %s:%d\n", client_ip, ntohs(client.sin_port)); memset(buffer, 0, sizeof(buffer)); int size = read(clientFd, buffer, sizeof(buffer)); if ( size 0 ) perror("read error"); exit(5); > printf("received %s from client\n", buffer); if (write(clientFd, buffer, size) 0) perror("write error"); exit(6); > close(clientFd); > close(serverFd); return 0; > We will briefly describe the functions used:
- socket: This function is used to create a socket which is used later for reading and writing from/to network.
- bind: This function binds the created socket with an IP address and port on the server, for the port we chose 1234 and the IP address used is INADDR_ANY which means you can use any IP address on the server to receive new clients.
- listen: This function instructs the socket to listen to new connection requests with a backlog parameter that defines the number of allowed pending sockets before new connections are refused.
- accept: This function returns a new socket that can be used to serve new clients
- read/write: These functions are used to read data from a socket or write data to it.
- close: This function closes the connection and the socket.
To run this server we execute these two commands
The first one compiles the source code and creates a binary file called server and the second one runs the server.
Echo client
To create the client we use a similar procedure, first add these two lines to CMakeLists.txt
add_executable(client src/client.c) target_link_libraries(client $) We create a new file in src directory called client.c with this content:
#include // perror, printf #include // exit, atoi #include // write, read, close #include // sockaddr_in, AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, INADDR_ANY, socket etc. #include // strlen, memset const char message[] = "Hello sockets world\n"; int main(int argc, char const *argv[]) int serverFd; struct sockaddr_in server; int len; int port = 1234; char *server_ip = "127.0.0.1"; char *buffer = "hello server"; if (argc == 3) server_ip = argv[1]; port = atoi(argv[2]); > serverFd = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, 0); if (serverFd 0) perror("Cannot create socket"); exit(1); > server.sin_family = AF_INET; server.sin_addr.s_addr = inet_addr(server_ip); server.sin_port = htons(port); len = sizeof(server); if (connect(serverFd, (struct sockaddr *)&server, len) 0) perror("Cannot connect to server"); exit(2); > if (write(serverFd, buffer, strlen(buffer)) 0) perror("Cannot write"); exit(3); > char recv[1024]; memset(recv, 0, sizeof(recv)); if (read(serverFd, recv, sizeof(recv)) 0) perror("cannot read"); exit(4); > printf("Received %s from server\n", recv); close(serverFd); return 0; > Here we use a very similar code except that we do not have bind, listen and accept, these are used only in server, also we use connect which connects to a remote server, we used the function inet_addr to convert an IP address from string notation to an int version.
To run the client use these commands:
We must run the server in a separate terminal and the client in another one to see the results.
Push code to github
In a previous article I described how to share your work on github, it can be found here, you can follow the same instructions here to push your code to github, but before you start make sure to have this file .gitignore in your sockets directory with this content
This makes sure that git will ignore the build directory and not push it to github because this directory contains generated files and is dependent on paths on your local machine so it is not right to share it with others.
The source code for this article can be found here
Conclusion
Here we only learned the very basics of sockets in C, in future articles we will learn more advanced topics such as:
- Processing requests from multiple clients at the same time.
- Creating a library for network IO stuff, another one for serving multiple requests and another one for parsing messages from different protocols and creating a server for these libraries.
- Managing the state of our servers
- Testing the performance of our servers using different ways to process multiple requests and comparing them with real world servers if possible.
- Securing network communication using encryption.
I hope you find the content useful for any comments or questions you can contact me on my email address mohsen47@hotmail.co.uk
Stay tuned for more articles. 🙂 🙂
Mouhsen Ibrahim Site
In this website I will post articles about Linux, DevOps and Database Administration and many other topics such as ELK, Development environments with vagrant and docker if you have any questions please contact me at mohsen47@hotmail.co.uk.