short (<1sec) timeout on IO::Socket

Errto has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Greetings,

I have a program that accepts socket connections with IO::Socket (or rather its subclass HTTP::Daemon). Because this program is also checking for user input, I'm using a timeout on the accept call. But it appears that the minimum timeout is 1 second. In the interest of responsiveness to picky users, I'd like to make it shorter if I could (maybe 0.25 or 0.5 sec). Is there a way to do this, or some creative workaround I could employ instead? My current code looks roughly like:

my $d = HTTP::Daemon->new (
    LocalAddr => 'localhost',
    LocalPort => 1244 ) 
      or die;
$d->timeout(1);
MAIN_LOOP:  while (1) {
    my $c = $d->accept;
    unless (defined $c) {
        do_other_stuff();
        next MAIN_LOOP;
    }
    process_request($c);
}
[download]

I'm running on Win32 ActivePerl 5.8.6 in case it matters.

Update: I am on crack. saintmike is correct. I don't know why I thought otherwise (or why I didn't retest one last time). saintmike++.

Comment on short (<1sec) timeout on IO::Socket Select or Download Code

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Re: short (<1sec) timeout on IO::Socket by saintmike (Vicar) on Aug 29, 2005 at 22:14 UTC
Specifying a fraction of a second should work just fine, since IO::Socket uses IO::Select, which uses perl's select which accepts values like `0.25`.	[reply] [d/l]
Re^2: short (<1sec) timeout on IO::Socket by Errto (Vicar) on Aug 29, 2005 at 23:10 UTC
I thought I tried that and it didn't work (I thought it truncated it to zero and did a non-blocking call). I'll try again.	[reply]
Re^2: short (<1sec) timeout on IO::Socket by pg (Canon) on Aug 30, 2005 at 03:01 UTC
IO::Socket uses IO::Select? You may want to re-evaluate this. Socket was never based on selector. If one is from c background, will right the way find this false. Update: saintmike was right and I was wrong. Perl's IO::Socket does require IO::Select at two places: accept and connect. I tried this code and it returned after 1 second as expected: `use IO::Socket; use strict; use warnings; print time(), "\n"; my $socket = IO::Socket::INET->new(Proto => "tcp", LocalAddr => "local +host", LocalPort => 3000, Listen => 10, Timeout => 0.1); for (1 .. 10) { my $connection = $socket->accept(); } print time(), "\n";` [download]	[reply] [d/l]