I'm writing a server that will copy data from a network interface to multiple sockets. Normally the right way to do this would be to fork a seperate process for each connection request. Unfortunately, only one process can read from the network interface at a time. If I do fork, simultaneous reads will be attempted and I'll dump core. Not a good solution.

Will threads help with this? I was thinking that I can have one thread that actually does the reads from the interface and another that handles the writes to the sockets. However, I understand that there are significant issues with threads and threading support isn't even compiled into perl by default.

Should I explore using threads? Will I need to recompile perl to make use of the Thread module? Should I just continue to use what I have now (a non blocking, non forking server which might not scale well)? One thing to keep in mind is that this is running on an SMP machine. Will that complicate things?

In reply to Threads, Forks, or Nothing? by rapier1

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