How to create an easy-to-program-for server for many clients in C#?

Question

I suppose similar questions were already asked, but I was unable to find any. Please feel free to point me to an existing solutions.

I'll explain my scenario. I'd like to create a server application. There are many clients (currently only a few dozens, but it should scale up to 1000+) that connect to the server (which is running on a single machine).

Each client periodically sends a small amount of data to the server to process (processing is quick). The server can also send small amounts of data to each client on a regular basis. The response time should be low (<100 ms), but realtime or anything like that is not required.

My first idea was back from when I was still programming in VB6: Create a server socket to listen to incoming requests, then create a client socket for each possible client (singlethreaded). I doubt this scales well. It is also difficult to implement the communication.

So I figured I'd create a listener thread to accept new client connections and a different thread to actually read the incoming data by the clients. Since there are going to be many clients, I don't want to create a thread for each client. Instead, I'd prefer to use a single thread to read all incoming data in a loop, then either processing these data directly or creating work items for a different thread to process. I guess this approach would scale well enough. Any comments on this idea are most welcome.

The remaining problem I'm worried about is easy of communication. The above solution seems to require a manual protocol, possibly sending ASCII commands via TCP. While this would work, I think there should be a better way nowadays.

Some interface/proxyish way seems reasonable. I worked a bit with Java RMI before. From my point of understanding, .NET Remoting serves a similar purpose. Is Remoting a feasible solution to the scenario I described (many clients)? Is there an even better way I don't know of yet?

Edit:

• This is not in LAN, but internet, if that matters.
• If possible, it should also run under Linux.

Answer 1

Hello,

As AresnMkrt pointed out, you should try WCF. Just take it as is (with netTcpBinding, but don't forget to switch security off) and create a Tracer Bullet - measure if performance meets your requirements.

If not, you can try to tune WCF - WCF is very extensible, and you can modify message serialization to send ASCII messages as you want.

Answer 2

Are you sure you need a binary protocol? Rather, are you sure you need to invent a whole new protocol where plain RESTful service with JSON/XML will suffice? WCF can help you in this regard a lot.