I have a doubt about socket programming. I am developing a TCP packet sniffer. I am using Socket.BeginAccept, Socket.BeginReceive to capture every packet, but when a packet is received I have to process something. It is a fast operation, but would take some milliseconds, and then call BeginReceive again.
My question is, what would happen if some packets are sent while I am processing, and haven't called BeginReceive? Are packets lost, or are they buffered internally? Is there a limit?
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In the linux world, the kernel will buffer them for you- I'm assuming the windows world does the same thing. But eventually as deltreme said, the buffer will overflow (there's definitely a limit) and there's a possibility the data will be dropped silently.
If you're doing something as heavyweight as a few milliseconds per packet, then you might want to consider using a threadpool to free up the network thread. I.e. all your network thread should do is grab the packet and throw it onto a queue for processing by another thread and go back to listening on the network. Another thread/threads can grab these packets off the queue and process them - the nice thing is you might even be able to process multiple packets at a time thus saving some overhead. Here your queue will act as the buffer and you can control how big you want it to be and you can define your own drop policy.
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TCP gives you a reliable stream, so data is not lost (assuming the underlying network doesn't fail).
The OS on both ends have buffers that takes care of the bytes when you're not reading them. Those buffers have a finite size, if they fill up, TCP have flow control - essentially the sending end will discover that buffers are full and stop sending until more space becomes available.
They are buffered, but I don't know on what level or what the limit is.
http://tangentsoft.net/wskfaq/ is a great resource you might find useful for any winsock related issue.