third-party libs

third-party/curl-7.21.4/lib/README.multi_socket

@@ -0,0 +1,53 @@
+Implementation of the curl_multi_socket API
+
+  The main ideas of the new API are simply:
+
+   1 - The application can use whatever event system it likes as it gets info
+       from libcurl about what file descriptors libcurl waits for what action
+       on. (The previous API returns fd_sets which is very select()-centric).
+
+   2 - When the application discovers action on a single socket, it calls
+       libcurl and informs that there was action on this particular socket and
+       libcurl can then act on that socket/transfer only and not care about
+       any other transfers. (The previous API always had to scan through all
+       the existing transfers.)
+
+  The idea is that curl_multi_socket_action() calls a given callback with
+  information about what socket to wait for what action on, and the callback
+  only gets called if the status of that socket has changed.
+
+  We also added a timer callback that makes libcurl call the application when
+  the timeout value changes, and you set that with curl_multi_setopt() and the
+  CURLMOPT_TIMERFUNCTION option. To get this to work, Internally, there's an
+  added a struct to each easy handle in which we store an "expire time" (if
+  any). The structs are then "splay sorted" so that we can add and remove
+  times from the linked list and yet somewhat swiftly figure out both how long
+  time there is until the next nearest timer expires and which timer (handle)
+  we should take care of now. Of course, the upside of all this is that we get
+  a curl_multi_timeout() that should also work with old-style applications
+  that use curl_multi_perform().
+
+  We created an internal "socket to easy handles" hash table that given
+  a socket (file descriptor) return the easy handle that waits for action on
+  that socket.  This hash is made using the already existing hash code
+  (previously only used for the DNS cache).
+
+  To make libcurl able to report plain sockets in the socket callback, we had
+  to re-organize the internals of the curl_multi_fdset() etc so that the
+  conversion from sockets to fd_sets for that function is only done in the
+  last step before the data is returned. I also had to extend c-ares to get a
+  function that can return plain sockets, as that library too returned only
+  fd_sets and that is no longer good enough. The changes done to c-ares are
+  available in c-ares 1.3.1 and later.
+
+  We have done a test runs with up to 9000 connections (with a single active
+  one). The curl_multi_socket_action() invoke then takes less than 10
+  microseconds in average (using the read-only-1-byte-at-a-time hack).  We are
+  now below the 60 microseconds "per socket action" goal (the extra 50 is the
+  time libevent needs).
+
+Documentation
+
+    http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/curl_multi_socket_action.html
+    http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/curl_multi_timeout.html
+    http://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/curl_multi_setopt.html