30.4 TCP Iterative Server

An iterative TCP server processes each client's request completely before moving on to the next client. Iterative TCP servers are rare, but we showed one in Figure 1.9: a simple daytime server.

We do, however, have a use for an iterative server in comparing the various servers in this chapter. If we run the client as

% client 192.168.1.20 8888 1 5000 4000

to an iterative server, we get the same number of TCP connections (5,000) and the same amount of data transferred across each connection. But since the server is iterative, there is no process control whatsoever performed by the server. This gives us a baseline measurement of the CPU time required to handle this number of clients that we can then subtract from all the other server measurements. From a process control perspective, the iterative server is the fastest possible because it performs no process control. We then compare the differences from this baseline in Figure 30.1.

We do not show our iterative server as it is a trivial modification to the concurrent server that we will present in the next section.