Delivery-Date: Thu Sep 11 21:05:38 2008
Message-Id: <200809120405.m8C45TpG023342@bourbon.usc.edu>
To: cs551@merlot.usc.edu
Subject: Re: strange behavior of client
Date: Thu, 11 Sep 2008 21:05:29 -0700
From: Bill Cheng <william@bourbon.usc.edu>

Someone wrote:

  > there's one file name given in the grading guidelines...    ./client get -m
  > localhost:$port /home/scf-22/csci551b/public/cali.wavif I try to request
  > this from the client, client does receive the data.
  > When timeout at server occurs, we are suppose to shutdown the server after
  > requesting all the child processes to terminate and waiting for it to
  > actually terminate.
  > Now, in the case of above request, even if the server has terminated (after
  > terminating all its child process, including the child which was serving
  > this request), the CLIENT keeps receiving some data.
  > Do you have any idea, why this happens?
  > Should we really care about this? (Server does terminate properly but client
  > doesn't. I don't understand where does it get data from. :(   )

The reason is that there are a lot of buffered data (probably
by TCP) that was delivered slowly to the client.  Also, the
client is calling MD5_Update() one byte at a time and that
slow things down further.  When nunki's load is high, this
gets worse.

What you need to determine is whether your client is doing
something reasonable or there is a bug in your client.  I
cannot tell you if something is acceptable or not.
--
Bill Cheng // bill.cheng@usc.edu <URL:http://merlot.usc.edu/william/usc/>