Event-driven Socket Programming

Question

I've developed an application that communicates with a device over TCP/IP. Right now I have an infinite loop in another thread that continually checks for data on the socket, calling Thread.sleep() each time to prevent the receive thread from using the entire CPU, but I think this may be limiting my throughput. I'd like to either find a class that will generate an event for me when data arrives (which I'm doing myself at present), or be able to call wait() and have my thread notify()ed when data arrives on the socket. Can either of these things be done?

Answer 1

I see. Could you post some of your code please? I
suspect you are doing a number of things incorrectly
here. Thread.sleep is not a good sign. I suspect you
may be using available.Yes, I'm using .available(). In the code below, link is a wrapper around a TCP socket. Incoming messages are delineated by a start and end byte, and the parseByte() function switches states and resets the receiveOffset counter depending on each incoming byte. Fully blocking I/O was not an option, as I needed to be able to detect incomplete messages and deliver an event to the application.
                   /* Continue running until the port is closed and there is no data left */
                   while(link != null && (link.isOpen() || receiveOffset > 0)) {
                           /* Read all available bytes and parse them one at a time */
                           while(link.available() > 0) {
                                   byte b;
                                   /* Parse the next input byte */
                                   b = link.read(1)[0];
                                   parseByte(b);
                                   /* Reset the no-input loop counter as there was input */
                                   loopCount = 0;
                           /* Increment the no-input loop counter if there is data in the receive buffer */
                           if(receiveOffset > 0) {
                                   loopCount++;
                           } else {
                                   /* Reset the no-input loop counter as the receive buffer is empty */
                                   loopCount = 0;
                           /* Check for too many loops with data in the receive buffer */
                           if(loopCount > LOOP_MAX) {
                                   /* Incomplete message - code omitted */
                           /* Allow other threads to run */
                           try { Thread.sleep(1); } catch(Exception e) { }
                   }