Network Programming with Perl

Standard Techniques for Concurrency

Over the years, network programmers have developed a number of standard techniques for maintaining concurrent I/O. The techniques range from simple tricks that add only a couple of lines of code to the basic server, to methods that more than double the size and complexity of the code.

Unfortunately, these techniques are hostage to the peculiarities of how the underlying operating system handles I/O, and this is notoriously variable from one platform to another. As a result, some of the techniques I describe here will only be available on UNIX systems.

Moving upward in complexity from the simplest to the most complex, the techniques are the forking server, the multithreaded server, and the multiplexed server. ...