As I mentioned back in February I’ve been working on a custom video streaming solution for one of my clients. This has been a lot of fun. It was a nicely defined spec using industry standard protocols developed on a fixed price basis with lots of TDD, what’s not to like.
The system allows a controlling application to set up RTSP streams for broadcasting to multiple clients. The data for the stream is being transmitted live from one of thousands of smart (IoT) devices and the server buffers this and broadcasts it using RTSP to publish the RTP streams.
It looks like the Slim Reader/Writer issue that I wrote about back in September is a kernel bug after all.
Stefan Boberg has just tweeted to let me know that Microsoft has confirmed it’s a bug and that a hot fix is in testing.
I’ve been working on some code for a client recently that needs to run in a multi-threaded environment. Unfortunately it was never really written with that requirement in mind, or, more likely, the people who wrote the code knew that it needed to be accessed from multiple threads but didn’t really understand quite what that meant. As such I’m doing some fairly hairy refactoring for them. It’s high risk as there are no unit tests and the budget doesn’t really extend to completing the work, let alone “spending extra time” writing unit tests… The code is written in quite a ‘C’ style, most things are simple structs and most data is public and as such member functions fall where they are most conveniently written.
This article over on Preshing on Programming looks useful. It gives a step by step guide for building GCC cross-compilers, I expect it will save me lots of time at some point in the future.
I’ve been noticing a strange thing for a while on Windows 8/8.1 and the equivalent server versions. The issue occurs when I’m using a Slim Reader/Writer Lock (SRWL) exclusively in exclusive mode (as a replacement for critical sections). What happens is, when a thread that has just unlocked a SRWL exits cleanly, immediately after unlocking the lock, sometimes threads that are waiting on the lock do not get woken and none of them acquire the lock.
I’ve written an article for Overload, one of the the ACCU’s journals. It’s based on my Efficient Multi-Threading blog post from a few weeks ago. Chris Oldwood mentioned to me about how the object described in Efficient Multi-Threading was similar to an Active Object which steals a calling thread to do its work rather than using one of its own and I agreed, he then suggested that I write it up for the ACCU journal.
Performance is always important for users of The Server Framework and I often spend time profiling the code and thinking about ways to improve performance. Hardware has changed considerably since I first designed The Server Framework back in 2001 and some things that worked well enough back then are now serious impediments to further performance gains. That’s not to say that the performance of The Server Framework today is bad, it’s not, it’s just that in some situations and on some hardware it could be even better.
Updated 1st February 2024 to fix broken links
There are a couple of undocumented Visual Studio compiler switches which can be useful occasionally:
/d1reportSingleClassLayout<name> - which produces a dump of the in memory layout of a given class
/d1reportAllClassLayout - which does the same for ALL classes
See here and here for more details.
And if you liked that, you might find this collection of debugging tricks interesting.
Recently, whilst continuing to improve the performance of various aspects of The Server Framework, I reached a point where I found I needed to replace some STL containers with intrusive containers which didn’t need to perform memory allocations during data insertion and removal. I had been toying with the idea of implementing custom containers for some time but have only recently had a pressing need for them.
The STL provides some marvellously usable code which has changed the way people view container classes in C++.
Today I discovered that C++ scoped static initialisation (function level) in Visual Studio is not done in a thread safe manner. It’s the kind of thing that I should have already known but I guess I assumed that since namespace level static initialisation was safe so was function level static initialisation. Unfortunately it’s not. If you read the MSDN documentation in a particular way you could decide that the docs say that it’s not; but it’s imprecise and unclear and I doubt that I did read the MSDN documentation anyway.
