1 Sockets

Sockets are used nearly everywhere, but are one of the most severely misunderstood technologies around. This is a 10,000 foot overview of sockets. It's not really a tutorial - you'll still have work to do in getting things working. It doesn't cover the fine points (and there are a lot of them), but I hope it will give you enough background to begin using them decently.

I'm only going to talk about INET sockets, but they account for at least 99% of the sockets in use. And I'll only talk about STREAM sockets - unless you really know what you're doing (in which case this HOWTO isn't for you!), you'll get better behavior and performance from a STREAM socket than anything else. I will try to clear up the mystery of what a socket is, as well as some hints on how to work with blocking and non-blocking sockets. But I'll start by talking about blocking sockets. You'll need to know how they work before dealing with non-blocking sockets.

Part of the trouble with understanding these things is that "socket" can mean a number of subtly different things, depending on context. So first, let's make a distinction between a "client" socket - an endpoint of a conversation, and a "server" socket, which is more like a switchboard operator. The client application (your browser, for example) uses "client" sockets exclusively; the web server it's talking to uses both "server" sockets and "client" sockets.

Subsections

1.1 History