tcp/ip communication sender receiver different process speed problem

Question

In my program the receiver has a bigger workload, should i make the sender wait for the receiver through methods like application level ACK?

Answer 1

You shouldn't directly send TCP ACK messages--those are handled at a low level by the OS. I'd look at the following in order of likelihood:

• Is there some easy optimization on the receiver? It's pretty rare that you can really fill a network pipe more quickly than the receiver can handle the data. Make sure that the receiver has at least two threads: a network i/o thread and a work thread.
• If the receiver is starting to panic, it could send a throttle message to the server, which makes the server cool its heels until the receiver catches up. This is more efficient than waiting for an ack message after every message, but it requires that the receiver know when it's about to fall behind, which might be difficult.
• Alternately, the slowest but most reliable thing is to have the receiver acknowledge every message from the server, sort of like you mentioned. This wouldn't be a TCP ACK, but a special message in the data format that your sender/receiver are using for comm.