Archives
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Memory Stream Multiplexer–write and read from many threads simultaneously
Here’s an implementation of
MemoryStream
like buffer manager where one thread can write and many threads can read simultaneously. Each reading thread gets its own reader and can read from the shared stream on its own without blocking write operation or other parallel read operations. It supports blocking Read call so that reader threads can callRead(…)
and wait until some data is available, exactly the same way you would expect aStream
to behave. You can use this to read content from network or file in one thread and then get it read by one or more threads simultaneously. Readers do not block writing. As a result, both read and write happens concurrently. Handy for building http proxy where you are downloading a certain file and you have multiple clients asking for the same file at the same time. You can download it in one thread and let one or more client threads read from the same buffer exactly at the same time. You can also use this to read same file on disk from multiple clients at the same time. You can also use this to implement a server side cache where the same buffer is read by multiple clients at the same time. -
ReadLine on Binary Stream
When you are reading data from a binary stream, like NetworkStream or FileStream and you need to read both binary chunks as well as read one text line at a time, you are on your own as BinaryReader nor Stream supports ReadLine. You can use StreamReader to do ReadLine, but it does not allow you to read chunks of bytes. The Read(byte[], int, int) is not there on StreamReader.