[zeromq-dev] adding timeout in zmq_poll

[Martin Sustrik]

Hi Pavel,

> I want to have timeout parameter in zmq_poll function. As i understood, 
> It is not very difficult to implement this. But i want to ask about 
> underwater stones:
> 
> 1) All oses support timeout parameter? in zmq.cpp i see one part of code 
> for windows, and one for other oses. Both parts have timeout parameter, 
> but for windows we can set timeout with microsecond granularity. We 
> can't get such granularity in linux?

See Steven's discussion of the topic.

> 
> 2) With adding timeout parameter in zmq_poll i must update bindings. I 
> looked at them and found, that binding for zmq_poll present only in 
> C,C++,Common Lisp bindings. May be i miss something?

Nope. zmq_poll is not available from python & ruby yet.

One more issue: poll function inside the zmq_poll function may return 
before there are any actual events (say if there are messages that are 
going to be filtered out) so note that it is called in a loop. Adding 
the timeout would mean that you have to measure time spent in each poll 
call and subtract it from the overall timeout time as passed to 
zmq_poll. The alternative would be not to guarantee any events on the 
return from zmq_poll.

> As i see, now zmq_poll is not optimized for polling big amount of 
> sockets. Is there plans to optimize this?

In theory. In practice, each 0MQ socket is capable of handling thousands 
of connections thus actual pollset for zmq_poll will presumably contain 
just 2-3 sockets. Sophisticated poll algorithms may be actually less 
efficient in such a case.

Martin