How can I make a TCP server process reject new connections when it is busy?

Starting with a basic server such as the first server here: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlipc.html#Sockets%3a-Client%2fServer-Communication

The server accepts an incoming connection and processes it. New connections are queued and the next accept picks up the next connection - all good. But I want to reject new incoming connections while it is busy (so that the client process can try a different box).

I thought the backlog parameter to listen would do this:

listen(Socket, 0)

[download]

or maybe

listen(Socket, 1)

but it does not seem to make any difference to the queueing behavior whatever value I set in listen.

OS is Ubuntu 11.10 and RedHat 5.6

In reply to TCP server: How to reject connections when busy? by squirrel

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.