The complete example

The shell of a POP3 server which performs its business logic processing in a seperate thread pool to its IO can be downloaded from here. The server has a call to ::Sleep() within its message processing code so that the processing takes some time and blocks. Notice how the IO on other connections is unaffected by this, and, if you want, add a similar call to the server we developed at the end of the last article and compare the behavior.

As with the other examples, simply telnet to localhost 5001 to test the server. The server runs until a named event is set and then shuts down. The very simple Server Shutdown program, available here, provides the off switch.

Download

The following source was built using Visual Studio 6.0 SP5 and Visual Studio .Net. You need to have a version of the Microsoft Platform SDK installed

Note that the debug builds of the code waste a lot of CPU cycles due to the the debug trace output. It's only worth profiling the release builds.