Subj : Re: Threading and Timeouts
To   : comp.programming.threads
From : David Schwartz
Date : Mon Jul 18 2005 04:12 pm


"MC" <nospam@nowhere.com> wrote in message 
news:p89od1hfi9dm4hff0dbf942uocqb57q9r5@4ax.com...

> First off, I'm in the WinAPI environment and I'm finding that
> asynchronous API calls for connecting to an FTP server are very
> tedious.  I'd prefer not to deal with all the states and handles if
> possible--hence the idea of using synchronous API calls in a separate
> thread.  Here's the question: if the main thread creates a worker
> thread and the worker makes a synchronous call--say to connect to the
> FTP server--what's the best way to implement a timeout on that call?
> What I've thought of so far is:
>
> main thread starts a timer
> main thread starts worker thread
> if timer ticks before worker is complete then terminate worker thread
>
> However, according to MSDN, terminating a thread should only be used
> as a last resort because it doesn't do proper cleanup.  But then how
> else can a timeout be implemented, given that the worker thread is
> busy in a synchronous API call?  Am I doing this all wrong??

    If you want timeouts, don't use synchronous API calls. As a simple fix , 
if you're only dealing with a single connection, you can use 'select' and 
make the socket non-blocking.

    DS

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