How to cleanly interrupt a thread blocking on a recv call?

Question

I have a multithreaded server written in C, with each client thread looking something like this:

ssize_t n;
struct request request;

// Main loop: receive requests from the client and send responses.
while(running && (n = recv(sockfd, &request, sizeof(request), 0)) == sizeof(request)) {
    // Process request and send response.
}
if(n == -1)
    perror("Error receiving request from client");
else if(n != sizeof(act))
    fprintf(stderr, "Error receiving request from client: Incomplete data\n");

// Clean-up code.

At some point, a client meets a certain criteria where it must be disconnected. If the client is regularly sending requests, this is fine because it can be informed of the disconnection in the responses; However sometimes the clients take a long time to send a request, so the client threads end up blocking in the recv call, and the client does not get disconnected until the next request/response.

Is there a clean way to disconnect the client from another thread while the client thread is blocking in the recv call? I tried close(sockfd) but that causes the error Error receiving request from client: Bad file descriptor to occur, which really isn't accurate.

Alternatively, is there a better way for me to be handling errors here?

Answer 1

Shutdown the socket for input from another thread. That will cause the reading thread to receive an EOS, which should cause it to close the socket and terminate if it is correctly written.

Answer 2

So you have at least these possibilities:

(1) pthread_kill will blow the thread out of recv with errno == EINTR and you can clean up and exit the thread on your own. Some people think this is nasty. Depends, really.

(2) Make your client socket(s) non-blocking and use select to wait on input for a specific period of time before checking if a switch used between the threads has been set to indicated they should shut down.

(3) In combo with (2) have each thread share a pipe with the master thread. Add it to the select. If it becomes readable and contains a shutdonw request, the thread shuts itself down.

(4) Look into the pthread_cancel mechanism if none of the above (or variations thereof) do not meet your needs.