I have read that Android 4.4+ supports 7 connections open at a time. My question is: does RxAndroidBle handle queuing of connection operations when this number is reached, or is it up to the user of the library to implement a queue for this?
The RxAndroidBle library doesn't handle queueing of connections. In fact it is quite impossible to do that since the number of connections is shared among every application in the system and not only the RxAndroidBle may be opening them.
Besides I have encountered some vendors (Micromax Canvas for instance) where despite using Android 5.0 it only worked with one connection at any given time.
Best Regards.
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Background:
I am using the RxAndroidBle library and have a requirement to quickly (as possible) connect to multiple devices at a time and start communicating. I used the RxBluetoothKit for iOS, and have started to use RxAndroidBle on my Pixel 2. This had worked as expected and I could establish connections to 6-8 devices, as required, in a few hundred milliseconds. However, broadening my testing to phones such as the Samsung S8 and Nexus 6P, it seems that establishing a single connection can now take upwards of 5-6 seconds instead of 50-60 millis. I will assume for the moment that that disparity is within the vendor-specific BT implementations. Ultimately, this means that connecting to, e.g., 5 devices now takes 30 seconds instead of < 1 second.
Question:
What I understand from the documentation and other questions asked, RxAndroidBle queues all scanning, connecting, and communication requests and executes them serially to be safe and maintain stability based on the variety of Bluetooth implementations in the Android ecosystem. However, is there currently a way to execute the requests (namely, connecting) in parallel to accept this risk and potentially cut my total time to establish multiple connections down to whichever device takes the longest to connect?
And side question: are there any ideas to diagnose what could possibly be taking 5 seconds to establish a connection with a device? Or do we simply need to accept that some phones will take that long in some instances?
However, is there currently a way to execute the requests (namely, connecting) in parallel to accept this risk and potentially cut my total time to establish multiple connections down to whichever device takes the longest to connect?
Yes. You may try to establish connections using autoConnect=true which would prevent locking the queue for longer than few milliseconds. The last connection should be started with autoConnect=false to kick off a scan. Some stack implementations are handling this quite OK but your mileage may vary.
And side question: are there any ideas to diagnose what could possibly be taking 5 seconds to establish a connection with a device?
You can check the Bluetooth HCI snoop log. Also you may try using a BLE sniffer to check what is actually happening "on-air" (e.g. an nRF51 Development Kit).
Or do we simply need to accept that some phones will take that long in some instances?
This is also an option since usually there is little one can do about connecting time. From my experience BLE stack/firmware implementations are wildly different from each other.
Consider a web application such as Google Chat, where the servers serve hundreds of millions of clients simultaneously. In such application, the servers have to push notifications to clients at near real time (in the chat example - incoming messages, presence notification etc.).
How do they implement it? Significant part of the clients are browser based. I suppose polling would overload even Google's servers. So, are they using something like Comet? If so - do they need to allocate a server for every 65536 clients (maximum TCP connections per machine)? I understand that there is a way to circumstance this limitation but I don't know how it's implemented.
Chat is not handled by single application / hardware / instance.
They definitely using many instances with load balancing that allows to scale chat system horizontally. It might be dedicated for regions or just single clustered system (I believe it is dedicated within regions but still clustered within region).
As well you can have as many connections as hardware and network will handle but not 64k.
Because 64k (actually less then that) is regarding Binding sockets (server sockets, but not client ones).
In case with google and based on supported browsers, they definitely use mixed technologies to communicate selecting the most powerful based on browser support. That can be long-polling, sockets and even oldest one: simple ajax.
As well for example facebook chat is based on erlang. And using erlang there is many examples having more then million connections.
I don't know how Google handle this, ans they probably won't tell us. But, today you can deal with http streaming, websockets or long polling to build such application. To give you an example Atmosphere framework
is a tool to build "real-time", efficient and scalable web application.
I have an Adobe AIR application that makes multiple connections to a server. When I open more than two connections I get an error:
2032: Stream Error.
Is there a configuration option or a property somewhere to raise the limit?
Not familiar with a configuration for this, but I have a theory you might test. Flash is single threaded, but handles requests asynchronously. It still has to handle the input of streams through its one thread. If you are open connections that stream/stay open for a long time, there is probably some blocking going on that could be longer than the allowed stream buffer blocking tolerance. Perhaps flash can handle 2 connections, but introducing the third starts to cause a stream to block too long. This is not exactly a solution, but may get you going in the right direction.
There are no limitation you may check this forum https://forums.adobe.com/thread/1281685
Also you should provide some details like sdk version,os etc
I'm developing a multi-player game and I know nothing about how to connect from one client to another via a server. Where do I start? Are there any whizzy open source projects which provide the communication framework into which I can drop my message data or do I have to write a load of complicated multi-threaded sockety code? Does the picture change at all if teh clients are running on phones?
I am language agnostic, although ideally I would have a Flash or Qt front end and a Java server, but that may be being a bit greedy.
I have spent a few hours googling, but the whole topic is new to me and I'm a bit lost. I'd appreciate help of any kind - including how to tag this question.
If latency isn't a huge issue, you could just implement a few web services to do message passing. This would not be a slow as you might think, and is easy to implement across languages. The downside is the client has to poll the server to get updates. so you could be looking at a few hundred ms to get from one client to another.
You can also use the built in flex messaging interface. There are provisions there to allow client to client interactions.
Typically game engines send UDP packets because of latency. The fact is that TCP is just not fast enough and reliability is less of a concern than speed is.
Web services would compound the latency issues inherent in TCP due to additional overhead. Further, they would eat up memory depending on number of expected players. Finally, they have a large amount of payload overhead that you just don't need (xml anyone?).
There are several ways to go about this. One way is centralized messaging (client/server). This means that you would have a java server listening for udp packets from the clients. It would then rebroadcast them to any of the relevant users.
A second way is decentralized (peer to peer). A client registers with the server to state what game / world it's in. From that it gets a list of other clients in that world. The server maintains that list and notifies the other clients of people who join / drop out.
From that point forward clients broadcast udp packets directly to the other users.
If you look for communication framework with high performance try look at ACE C++ framework (it has Java bindings).
Official web-site is: http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE-overview.html
You could also look into Flash Media Interactive Server, or if you want a Java implementation, Wowsa or Red5. Those use AMF and provide native functionality for ShareObjects including synching of the ShareObjects among connected clients.
Those aren't peer to peer though (yet, it's coming soon I hear). They use centralized messaging managed by the server.
Good luck
When writing a custom server, what are the best practices or techniques to determine maximum number of users that can connect to the server at any given time?
I would assume that the capabilities of the computer hardware, network capacity, and server protocol would all be important factors.
Also, do you think it is a good practice to limit the number of network connections to a certain maximum number of users? Or should the server not limit the number of network connections and let performance degrade until the response time is extremely high?
Dan Kegel put together a summary of techniques for handling large amounts of network connections from a single server, here: http://www.kegel.com/c10k.html
In general modern servers can handle very large numbers of concurrent connections. I've worked on systems having over 8,000 concurrently open TCP/IP sockets.
You will need a high quality servicing interface to handle that kind of load, check out libevent or libev.
That is a good question and it definitely is situational. What is your computer? Do you have a 4 socket machine filled with Quad Core Xeons, 128 GB of RAM, and Fiber Channel Connectivity (like the pair of Dell R900s we just bought)? Or are you running on a p3 550 with 256 MB of RAM, and 56K modem? How much load does each connection place on your server? What kind of response is acceptible?
These are the questions you need to answer. I guess the best way to find the answer is through load testing. Create a unit test of the expected (and maybe some unexpected) paths that your code will perform against your server. Find a load testing framework that will allow you to simulate 10, 100, 1000, 10000 users performing those tasks at the same time.
That will tell you how many connections your computer can support.
The great thing about the load/unit test scenario is that you can put in response time expectations in your unit tests and increase the load until you fall outside of your response time. If you have a requirement of supporting X number of Users with Y second response, you will be able to demonstrate it with your load tests.
One of the biggest setbacks in high concurrency connections is actually the routers involved. Home user oriented routers usually have a small NAT table, preventing the router from actually servicing the server the connections.
Be sure to research your router/ network infrastructure setup just as well.
I think you shouldn't limit the number of connections your server will allow - just catch and handle properly any exceptions that might occur when accepting and closing connections and you should be fine. You should leave that kind of lower level programming to the underlying OS layers - that way you can port your server easier etc.
This really depends on your operating system.
Different Unix flavors will support "unlimited" number of file handles / sockets others have high values like 32768.
A typical user limit is 8192 but it can usually be set higher.
I think windows is more limiting but the server version may have higher limits.