Hi all, I have to write a network server (sort of) and I am looking for your valuable comments. Currently I have written a prototype in VB6 but it can only handle up to 30 or so clients. I need to upgrade the application so that it can handle up to 1000-1500 clients at a time (later if every thing works fine then hoping for 5000-6000 client). The scenario is as follows.
1. An server application (above mentioned app) will be listening on a particular port for client connection. The client will be connecting to it using TCP protocol. 2. The server will be continuously sending a trigger pulse to all the clients connected on this port (say every 3 sec). 3. Each client (in my case another app written in VB6) will be sending a string of approx. 70-75 chars every 1 sec. 4. Each string will contain a start and an end char. 5. Each string will contain some data eg. first 4 char acc. id, next 10 char user name etc. 6. As the data may come in small chunks (due to the nature of network and buffering), it will be the server's responsibility to buffer incoming data and look for valid strings in buffer. 7. Once the server software find a valid string in buffer, it should extract the valid string from the buffer and parse it (extract the data in the string) and insert into a database server with timestamps (in my case SQL Server 2k). 8. The server will also have to send the valid string to two other ports (one for showing status in GUI) and second to a remote client which will further parse the data and do some processing on the data (currently written in VB). There can be around 20-30 such clients. For GUI there will be around 5-10 clients. 9. The remote clients to whom the valid string is being sent can also send some data to be sent back to the clients from whom we are receiving data per sec. For this the remote client will send data to the server and the servers responsibility will be again to parse this data and send it to the appropriate client on the other side. This string can also be intended for broadcasting, in that case we may need to send data to all the clients on other side. This is a general view for the application. Now here are the issues on which I am requesting your comments and suggestions. Q. Is it possible to write an application for this kind of server activity in Python? I mean whether Python will be suitable for this kind of high activity load, real time app? Q. How much time it can take (approx.) to develop such kind of server? Q. Do we need multi threading? If so, then whether the Socket modules will be safe to use with multi threading? Q. What modules for networking (socket ?), database access etc should I use? Currently as I am just planning about the solutions so I don't have much of questions in my mind. But if it is possible to write this kind of app in Python easily (relative to C family of language ;) , then surely I will have some more questions for experts out there ;) . As for me, I have written some small scripts in Python. I have used Tk for GUI, PostgreSQL and Mysql for my Database, some CGI programming with apache, reporting using reportlab. But that was a long time back (some 2 yrs back). After that I joined one organization working on M$ platforms. So, since then I am working in VB6 only. But I am confident that after 7-10 days of study I can again start working with Python (Which is of course my favorite language :) . Eagerly waiting for your comments and suggestions. TIA, Vivek Kumar __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
