Socklen_t client_addr_len = sizeof(client_addr) void enter_server_loop(int server_socket) In the remaining parts of this article series, we will explore further more server architectures and measure their performance to understand how one is better or worse than the other. While this approach seems to be great and it looks like we’re all set up for the rest of our lives as legendary Linux programmers, we will see the reason why performance takes a big hit with this server architecture and how to fix it. This means that the clients don’t have to wait for their request to be accepted and processed while the server is busy processing requests from other clients. This means that while several requests could be in the process of being served by child processes, the parent is always ready to accept more client connections. This child process deals with the client request, while the parent can immediately go back to blocking on accept(). In this “forking” server, we create a new child process every time we accept a client request. If there are many concurrent client connections, they’d all be queued, waiting for the server to call accept().

This server called accept() whenever it was done serving one client so that it could accept more client connections and process them one after the other. In Part I: Iterative servers, we took a look at a server which deals with one client request at a time. This chapter is part of a series of articles on Linux application performance.

Client server program in c using fork