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Best Practices for Interactive Applications

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In morphing the Life cell update code, several guidelines for writing high performance network applications have been uncovered. Some general strategies to apply when writing these types of applications are:

  • Make the data stream as much as possible, rather than going in chunks.
  • Use a few large transactions rather than many small ones. Large transactions can also be efficiently streamed.
  • Recognize that the network is a slow, unreliable resource and develop each application to minimize its reliance on the network.
  • Use a well-architected representation of the data on the network. The data representation should be computer-architecture agnostic, contain no fat, and possibly be compressed.
  • During initialization and shutdown, do not make the user wait for the network to start up or shut down. Network related initialization could take a relatively long time. Separate the noncritical network code.
  • Handle errors as appropriate to their impact. Not all errors are critical. Implement recovery mechanisms and provide nonintrusive user feedback.
  • Use remote procedure calls (RPC) only when appropriate. RPC is synchronous on Windows Me/98 and always results in chatty, fat protocols when used to send small amounts of data.
  • Measure your network overhead using Netstat; you may be surprised at what your measurements reveal.
  • Test the application on a variety of networks, especially slow or loss-prone networks. Wireless LAN networks, modems, and virtual private networks (VPN) over the Internet are good networks for testing.

High-performance Windows Sockets Applications