Tcp {active, true} problem

[Kent Boortz]

>> problem with gen_tcp. I am using {active, true} and receiving with
>>
>> receive
>>         {tcp, Socket, Packet} ->
>> end
>>
>> If I send packets to this at a 500 milliseconds apart I receive all of the
>> packets perfectly and the proxy works well. My problem arises when I send
>> a number of packets quickly( < 500 ms). I receive them as one large ascii
>> string. I was wondering, befor I write a parser of sorts, if there is some
>> other way to deal with this problem.
> 
> As you already seen you can use {packet,1 | 2 | 4} to let the erlang driver
> packetize the data for you.
> I think the option {nodelay, true} might be of interest in this case.
> TCP_NODELAY option is used to set aside the buffering algorithm in the os
> kernel tcp/ip driver, leading to that the data is sent as quickly as possible
> and not optimized as stream data.

Are you sure that the TCP_NODELAY has that exact meaning, i.e. that it
sets aside *all* buffering? I think the OS may choose to combine the
data from two write operations even with that flag set. The opposite
problem may also happen if the machine has some load, one larger
"packet" sent may show up as two separate messages in Erlang.  It may
work to ignore this in 99.9% of the cases but a small OS upgrade or
some load on the machine or network may easily break the code.

I have in the past seen this problem while testing a product well
known to all on this list ;-)

kent