How to increase processor utilize for a specific action - c#

I have application that using PcapDotNet DLLs and send packets.
In some Pcap files with high speed rate (~50 Mbit/Sec or ~9000 Packet per seconds) the play takes long time compare to the original Pcap length\duration and I can see that ~25% of my CPUs (i have 4 cores) are utilized.
I have asked this question in the project page and the developer suggest I parallel my program so I can better utilize my resources because this is single thread program.
This is example of my function that sends the packets and it does the most pf the work, this function also include several events like report how many packets sent etc... (not include in mt example)
So my question is, assuming that the function is the one that does the most work How can I divide my CPU resources in a better way?
using (PacketSendBuffer sendBuffer = new PacketSendBuffer((uint)capLength))
{
while (inputCommunicator.ReceivePacket(out packet) == PacketCommunicatorReceiveResult.Ok) // Read the packets from the file
{
if (packet != null)
{
try
{
_outputCommunicator.SendPacket(packet); // Send the Packets
_sentPackets++;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
// Throw exception
}
}
}
}

Are you sure you're not spinning? What's the read timeout on your inputCommunicator? It might be a better idea to use callbacks rather than infinite loops to read the packets:
http://pcapdotnet.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Pcap.Net%20Tutorial%20-%20Opening%20an%20adapter%20and%20capturing%20the%20packets
Or you could use asynchronous I/O instead, given that you're not actually doing any real CPU work.
In any case, try profiling the application. Find out where it spends time. Find any concurrency issues. You'll have a clearer picture then.

Related

Fastest way to "broadcast" to list of TCP clients

I'm currently writing a chat-server, bottom up, in C#.
It's like one single big room, with all the clients in, and then you can initiate private chats also. I've also laid the code out for future integration of multiple rooms (but not necessary right now).
It's been written mostly for fun, but also because I'm going to make a new chatsite for young people like myself, as there are no one left here in Denmark.
I've just tested it out with 170 clients (Written in Javascript with JQuery and a Flash bridge to socket connectivity). The response time on local network from a message being sent to it being delivered was less than 1 second. But now I'm considering what kind of performance I'm able to squeeze out of this.
I can see if I connect two clients and then 168 other, and write on client 2 and watch client 1, it comes up immediately on client 1. And the CPU usage and RAM usage shows no signs of server stress at all. It copes fine and I think it can scale to at least 1000 - 1500 without the slightest problem.
I have however noticed something, and that is if I open the 170 clients again and send a message on client 1 and watch on client 170, there is a log around 750 milliseconds or so.
I know the problem, and that is, when the server receives a chat message it broadcasts it to every client on the server. It does however need to enumerate all these clients, and that takes time. The delay right now is very acceptable for a chat, but I'm worried client 1 sending to client 750 maybe (not tested yet) will take 2 - 3 seconds. And i'm also worried when I begin to get maybe 2 - 3 messages a second.
So to sum it up, I want to speed up the server broadcasting process. I'm already utilizing a parallel foreach loop and I'm also using asynchronous sockets.
Here is the broadcasting code:
lock (_clientLock)
{
Parallel.ForEach(_clients, c =>
{
c.Value.Send(message);
});
}
And here is the send function being invoked on each client:
try {
byte[] bytesOut = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(message + "\0");
_socket.BeginSend(bytesOut, 0, bytesOut.Length, SocketFlags.None, new AsyncCallback(OnSocketSent), null);
}
catch (Exception ex) { Drop(); }
I want to know if there is any way to speed this up?
I've considered writing some kind of helper class accepting messages in a que and then using maybe 20 threads or so, to split up the broadcasting list.
But I want to know YOUR opinions on this topic, I'm a student and I want to learn! (:
Btw. I like how you spot problems in your code when about to post to stack overflow. I've now made an overloaded function to accept a byte array from the server class when using broadcast, so the UTF-8 conversion only needs to happen once. Also to play it safe, the calculation of the byte array length only happens once now. See the updated version below.
But I'm still interested in ways of improving this even more!
Updated broadcast function:
lock (_clientLock)
{
byte[] bytesOut = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(message + "\0");
int bytesOutLength = bytesOut.Length;
Parallel.ForEach(_clients, c =>
{
c.Value.Send(bytesOut, bytesOutLength);
});
}
Updated send function on client object:
public void Send(byte[] message, int length)
{
try
{
_socket.BeginSend(message, 0, length, SocketFlags.None, new AsyncCallback(OnSocketSent), null);
}
catch (Exception ex) { Drop(); }
}
~1s sounds really slow for a local network. Average LAN latency is 0.3ms. Is Nagle enabled or disabled? I'm guessing it is enabled... so: change that (Socket.NoDelay). That does mean you have to take responsibility for not writing to the socket in an overly-fragmented way, of course - so don't drip the message in character-by-character. Assemble the message to send (or better: multiple outstanding messages) in memory, and send it as a unit.

Waiting for networking C# console application to fully start

I have run into an issue with the slow C# start-up time causing UDP packets to drop initially. Below, I is what I have done to mitigate this start-up delay. I essentially wait an additional 10ms between the first two packet transmissions. This fixes the initial drops at least on my machine. My concern is that a slower machine may need a longer delay than this.
private void FlushPacketsToNetwork()
{
MemoryStream packetStream = new MemoryStream();
while (packetQ.Count != 0)
{
byte[] packetBytes = packetQ.Dequeue().ToArray();
packetStream.Write(packetBytes, 0, packetBytes.Length);
}
byte[] txArray = packetStream.ToArray();
udpSocket.Send(txArray);
txCount++;
ExecuteStartupDelay();
}
// socket takes too long to transmit unless I give it some time to "warm up"
private void ExecuteStartupDelay()
{
if (txCount < 3)
{
timer.SpinWait(10e-3);
}
}
So, I am wondering is there a better approach to let C# fully load all of its dependencies? I really don't mind if it takes several seconds to completely load; I just do not want to do any high bandwidth transmissions until C# is ready for full speed.
Additional relevant details
This is a console application, the network transmission is run from a separate thread, and the main thread just waits for a key press to terminate the network transmitter.
In the Program.Main method I have tried to get the most performance from my application by using the highest priorities reasonable:
public static void Main(string[] args)
{
Process.GetCurrentProcess().PriorityClass = ProcessPriorityClass.High;
...
Thread workerThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(worker.Run));
workerThread.Priority = ThreadPriority.Highest;
workerThread.Start();
...
Console.WriteLine("Press any key to stop the stream...");
WaitForKeyPress();
worker.RequestStop = true;
workerThread.Join();
Also, the socket settings I am currently using are shown below:
udpSocket = new Socket(targetEndPoint.Address.AddressFamily,
SocketType.Dgram,
ProtocolType.Udp);
udpSocket.Ttl = ttl;
udpSocket.SendBufferSize = 1024 * 1024;
udpSocket.Blocking = true;
udpSocket.Connect(targetEndPoint);
The default SendBufferSize is 8192, so I went ahead and moved it up to a megabyte, but this setting did not seem to have any affect on the dropped packets at the beginning.
From the comments I learned that TCP is not an option for you (because of inherent delays in transmission), also you do not want to loose packets due to other side being not fully loaded.
So you actually need to implement some features present in TCP (retransmission) but in more robust and lightweight fashion. I also assume that you are in control of the receiving side.
I propose that you send some predetermined number of packets. And then wait for confirmation. For instance, every packet can have an id that constantly grows. Every N packets, receiving application sends the number of last received packet to the sender. After receiving this number sender will know if it is necessary to repeat last N packets.
This approach should not hurt your bandwidth very much and you will get some sort of information about received data (although not guaranteed).
Otherwise it is best to switch to TCP. By the way did you try using TCP? How much your bandwidth hurts because of it?

How to properly parallelise job heavily relying on I/O

I'm building a console application that have to process a bunch of data.
Basically, the application grabs references from a DB. For each reference, parse the content of the file and make some changes. The files are HTML files, and the process is doing a heavy work with RegEx replacements (find references and transform them into links). The results in then stored on the file system and sent to an external system.
If I resume the process, in a sequential way :
var refs = GetReferencesFromDB(); // ~5000 Datarow returned
foreach(var ref in refs)
{
var filePath = GetFilePath(ref); // This method looks up in a previously loaded file list
var html = File.ReadAllText(filePath); // Read html locally, or from a network drive
var convertedHtml = ParseHtml(html);
File.WriteAllText(destinationFilePath); // Copy the result locally, or a network drive
SendToWs(ref, convertedHtml);
}
My program is working correctly but is quite slow. That's why I want to parallelise the process.
By now, I made a simple Parallelization adding AsParallel :
var refs = GetReferencesFromDB().AsParallel();
refs.ForAll(ref=>
{
var filePath = GetFilePath(ref);
var html = File.ReadAllText(filePath);
var convertedHtml = ParseHtml(html);
File.WriteAllText(destinationFilePath);
SendToWs(ref, convertedHtml);
});
This simple change decrease the duration of the process (25% less time). However, what I understand with parallelization is that there won't be much benefits (or worse, less benefits) if parallelyzing over resources relying on I/O, because the i/o won't magically doubles.
That's why I think I should change my approach not to parallelize the whole process, but to create dependent chained queued tasks.
I.E., I should create a flow like :
Queue read file. When finished, Queue ParseHtml. When finished, Queue both send to WS and write locally. When finished, log the result.
However, I don't know how to realize such think.
I feel it will ends in a set of consumer/producer queues, but I didn't find a correct sample.
And moreover, I'm not sure if there will be benefits.
thanks for advices
[Edit] In fact, I'm the perfect candidate for using c# 4.5... if only it was rtm :)
[Edit 2] Another thing making me thinking it's not correctly parallelized, is that in the resource monitor, I see graphs of CPU, network I/O and disk I/O not stable. when one is high, others are low to medium
You're not leveraging any async I/O APIs in any of your code. Everything you're doing is CPU bound and all your I/O operations are going to waste CPU resources blocking. AsParallel is for compute bound tasks, if you want to take advantage of async I/O you need to leverage the Asynchronous Programming Model (APM) based APIs today in <= v4.0. This is done by looking for BeginXXX/EndXXX methods on the I/O based classes you're using and leveraging those whenever available.
Read this post for starters: TPL TaskFactory.FromAsync vs Tasks with blocking methods
Next, you don't want to use AsParallel in this case anyway. AsParallel enables streaming which will result in an immediately scheduling a new Task per item, but you don't need/want that here. You'd be much better served by partitioning the work using Parallel::ForEach.
Let's see how you can use this knowledge to achieve max concurrency in your specific case:
var refs = GetReferencesFromDB();
// Using Parallel::ForEach here will partition and process your data on separate worker threads
Parallel.ForEach(
refs,
ref =>
{
string filePath = GetFilePath(ref);
byte[] fileDataBuffer = new byte[1048576];
// Need to use FileStream API directly so we can enable async I/O
FileStream sourceFileStream = new FileStream(
filePath,
FileMode.Open,
FileAccess.Read,
FileShare.Read,
8192,
true);
// Use FromAsync to read the data from the file
Task<int> readSourceFileStreamTask = Task.Factory.FromAsync(
sourceFileStream.BeginRead
sourceFileStream.EndRead
fileDataBuffer,
fileDataBuffer.Length,
null);
// Add a continuation that will fire when the async read is completed
readSourceFileStreamTask.ContinueWith(readSourceFileStreamAntecedent =>
{
int soureFileStreamBytesRead;
try
{
// Determine exactly how many bytes were read
// NOTE: this will propagate any potential exception that may have occurred in EndRead
sourceFileStreamBytesRead = readSourceFileStreamAntecedent.Result;
}
finally
{
// Always clean up the source stream
sourceFileStream.Close();
sourceFileStream = null;
}
// This is here to make sure you don't end up trying to read files larger than this sample code can handle
if(sourceFileStreamBytesRead == fileDataBuffer.Length)
{
throw new NotSupportedException("You need to implement reading files larger than 1MB. :P");
}
// Convert the file data to a string
string html = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(fileDataBuffer, 0, sourceFileStreamBytesRead);
// Parse the HTML
string convertedHtml = ParseHtml(html);
// This is here to make sure you don't end up trying to write files larger than this sample code can handle
if(Encoding.UTF8.GetByteCount > fileDataBuffer.Length)
{
throw new NotSupportedException("You need to implement writing files larger than 1MB. :P");
}
// Convert the file data back to bytes for writing
Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(convertedHtml, 0, convertedHtml.Length, fileDataBuffer, 0);
// Need to use FileStream API directly so we can enable async I/O
FileStream destinationFileStream = new FileStream(
destinationFilePath,
FileMode.OpenOrCreate,
FileAccess.Write,
FileShare.None,
8192,
true);
// Use FromAsync to read the data from the file
Task destinationFileStreamWriteTask = Task.Factory.FromAsync(
destinationFileStream.BeginWrite,
destinationFileStream.EndWrite,
fileDataBuffer,
0,
fileDataBuffer.Length,
null);
// Add a continuation that will fire when the async write is completed
destinationFileStreamWriteTask.ContinueWith(destinationFileStreamWriteAntecedent =>
{
try
{
// NOTE: we call wait here to observe any potential exceptions that might have occurred in EndWrite
destinationFileStreamWriteAntecedent.Wait();
}
finally
{
// Always close the destination file stream
destinationFileStream.Close();
destinationFileStream = null;
}
},
TaskContinuationOptions.AttachedToParent);
// Send to external system **concurrent** to writing to destination file system above
SendToWs(ref, convertedHtml);
},
TaskContinuationOptions.AttachedToParent);
});
Now, here's few notes:
This is sample code so I'm using a 1MB buffer to read/write files. This is excessive for HTML files and wasteful of system resources. You can either lower it to suit your max needs or implement chained reads/writes into a StringBuilder which is an excercise I leave up to you since I'd be writing ~500 more lines of code to do async chained reads/writes. :P
You'll note that on the continuations for the read/write tasks I have TaskContinuationOptions.AttachedToParent. This is very important as it will prevent the worker thread that the Parallel::ForEach starts the work with from completing until all the underlying async calls have completed. If this was not here you would kick off work for all 5000 items concurrently which would pollute the TPL subsystem with thousands of scheduled Tasks and not scale properly at all.
I call SendToWs concurrent to writing the file to the file share here. I don't know what is underlying the implementation of SendToWs, but it too sounds like a good candidate for making async. Right now it's assumed it's pure compute work and, as such, is going to burn a CPU thread while executing. I leave it as an excercise to you to figure out how best to leverage what I've shown you to improve throughput there.
This is all typed free form and my brain was the only compiler here and SO's syntax higlighting is all I used to make sure syntax was good. So, please forgive any syntax errors and let me know if I screwed up anything too badly that you can't make heads or tails of it and I'll follow up.
The good news is your logic could be easily separated into steps that go into a producer-consumer pipeline.
Step 1: Read file
Step 2: Parse file
Step 3: Write file
Step 4: SendToWs
If you are using .NET 4.0 you can use the BlockingCollection data structure as the backbone for the each step's producer-consumer queue. The main thread will enqueue each work item into step 1's queue where it will be picked up and processed and then forwarded on to step 2's queue and so on and so forth.
If you are willing to move on to the Async CTP then you can take advantage of the new TPL Dataflow structures for this as well. There is the BufferBlock<T> data structure, among others, that behaves in a similar manner to BlockingCollection and integrates well with the new async and await keywords.
Because your algorithm is IO bound the producer-consumer strategies may not get you the performance boost you are looking for, but at least you will have a very elegant solution that would scale well if you could increase the IO throughput. I am afraid steps 1 and 3 will be the bottlenecks and the pipeline will not balance well, but it is worth experimenting with.
Just a suggestion, but have you looked into the Consumer / Producer pattern ? A certain number of threads would read your files on disk and feed the content to a queue. Then another set of threads, known as the consumers, would "consume" the queue as its filled. http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/3023
Your best bet in these kind of scenario is definitely the producer-consumer model. One thread to pull the data and a bunch of workers to process it. There's no easy way around the I/O so you might as well just focus on optimizing the computation itself.
I will now try to sketch a model:
// producer thread
var refs = GetReferencesFromDB(); // ~5000 Datarow returned
foreach(var ref in refs)
{
lock(queue)
{
queue.Enqueue(ref);
event.Set();
}
// if the queue is limited, test if the queue is full and wait.
}
// consumer threads
while(true)
{
value = null;
lock(queue)
{
if(queue.Count > 0)
{
value = queue.Dequeue();
}
}
if(value != null)
// process value
else
event.WaitOne(); // event to signal that an item was placed in the queue.
}
You can find more details about producer/consumer in part 4 of Threading in C#: http://www.albahari.com/threading/part4.aspx
I think your approach to split up the list of files and process each file in one batch is ok.
My feeling is that you might get more performance gain if you play with degree of parallelism.
See: var refs = GetReferencesFromDB().AsParallel().WithDegreeOfParallelism(16); this would start processing 16 files at the same time. Currently you are processing probably 2 or 4 files depending on number of cores you have. This is only efficient when you have only computation without IO. For IO intensive tasks adjustment might bring incredible performance improvements reducing processor idle time.
If you are going to split up and join tasks back using producer-consumer look at this sample: Using Parallel Linq Extensions to union two sequences, how can one yield the fastest results first?

How to handle large numbers of concurrent disk write requests as efficiently as possible

Say the method below is being called several thousand times by different threads in a .net 4 application. What’s the best way to handle this situation? Understand that the disk is the bottleneck here but I’d like the WriteFile() method to return quickly.
Data can be can be up to a few MB. Are we talking threadpool, TPL or the like?
public void WriteFile(string FileName, MemoryStream Data)
{
try
{
using (FileStream DiskFile = File.OpenWrite(FileName))
{
Data.WriteTo(DiskFile);
DiskFile.Flush();
DiskFile.Close();
}
}
catch (Exception e)
{
Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
}
}
If you want to return quickly and not really care that operation is synchronous you could create some kind of in memory Queue where you will be putting write requests , and while Queue is not filled up you can return from method quickly. Another thread will be responsible for dispatching Queue and writing files. If your WriteFile is called and queue is full you will have to wait until you can queue and execution will become synchronous again, but that way you could have a big buffer so if process file write requests is not linear , but is more spiky instead (with pauses between write file calls spikes) such change can be seen as an improvement in your performance.
UPDATE:
Made a little picture for you. Notice that bottleneck always exists, all you can possibly do is optimize requests by using a queue. Notice that queue has limits, so when its filled up , you cannot insta queue files into, you have to wait so there is a free space in that buffer too. But for situation presented on picture (3 bucket requests) its obvious you can quickly put buckets into queue and return, while in first case you have to do that 1 by one and block execution.
Notice that you never need to execute many IO threads at once, since they will all be using same bottleneck and you will just be wasting memory if you try to parallel this heavily, I believe 2 - 10 threads tops will take all available IO bandwidth easily, and will limit application memory usage too.
Since you say that the files don't need to be written in order nor immediately, the simplest approach would be to use a Task:
private void WriteFileAsynchronously(string FileName, MemoryStream Data)
{
Task.Factory.StartNew(() => WriteFileSynchronously(FileName, Data));
}
private void WriteFileSynchronously(string FileName, MemoryStream Data)
{
try
{
using (FileStream DiskFile = File.OpenWrite(FileName))
{
Data.WriteTo(DiskFile);
DiskFile.Flush();
DiskFile.Close();
}
}
catch (Exception e)
{
Console.WriteLine(e.Message);
}
}
The TPL uses the thread pool internally, and should be fairly efficient even for large numbers of tasks.
If data is coming in faster than you can log it, you have a real problem. A producer/consumer design that has WriteFile just throwing stuff into a ConcurrentQueue or similar structure, and a separate thread servicing that queue works great ... until the queue fills up. And if you're talking about opening 50,000 different files, things are going to back up quick. Not to mention that your data that can be several megabytes for each file is going to further limit the size of your queue.
I've had a similar problem that I solved by having the WriteFile method append to a single file. The records it wrote had a record number, file name, length, and then the data. As Hans pointed out in a comment to your original question, writing to a file is quick; opening a file is slow.
A second thread in my program starts reading that file that WriteFile is writing to. That thread reads each record header (number, filename, length), opens a new file, and then copies data from the log file to the final file.
This works better if the log file and the final file are are on different disks, but it can still work well with a single spindle. It sure exercises your hard drive, though.
It has the drawback of requiring 2X the disk space, but with 2-terabyte drives under $150, I don't consider that much of a problem. It's also less efficient overall than directly writing the data (because you have to handle the data twice), but it has the benefit of not causing the main processing thread to stall.
Encapsulate your complete method implementation in a new Thread(). Then you can "fire-and-forget" these threads and return to the main calling thread.
foreach (file in filesArray)
{
try
{
System.Threading.Thread updateThread = new System.Threading.Thread(delegate()
{
WriteFileSynchronous(fileName, data);
});
updateThread.Start();
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
string errMsg = ex.Message;
Exception innerEx = ex.InnerException;
while (innerEx != null)
{
errMsg += "\n" + innerEx.Message;
innerEx = innerEx.InnerException;
}
errorMessages.Add(errMsg);
}
}

How do I obtain the latency between server and client in C#?

I'm working on a C# Server application for a game engine I'm writing in ActionScript 3. I'm using an authoritative server model as to prevent cheating and ensure fair game. So far, everything works well:
When the client begins moving, it tells the server and starts rendering locally; the server, then, tells everyone else that client X has began moving, among with details so they can also begin rendering. When the client stops moving, it tells the server, which performs calculations based on the time the client began moving and the client render tick delay and replies to everyone, so they can update with the correct values.
The thing is, when I use the default 20ms tick delay on server calculations, when the client moves for a rather long distance, there's a noticeable tilt forward when it stops. If I increase slightly the delay to 22ms, on my local network everything runs very smoothly, but in other locations, the tilt is still there. After experimenting a little, I noticed that the extra delay needed is pretty much tied to the latency between client and server. I even boiled it down to a formula that would work quite nicely: delay = 20 + (latency / 10).
So, how would I proceed to obtain the latency between a certain client and the server (I'm using asynchronous sockets). The CPU effort can't be too much, as to not have the server run slowly. Also, is this really the best way, or is there a more efficient/easier way to do this?
Sorry that this isn't directly answering your question, but generally speaking you shouldn't rely too heavily on measuring latency because it can be quite variable. Not only that, you don't know if the ping time you measure is even symmetrical, which is important. There's no point applying 10ms of latency correction if it turns out that the ping time of 20ms is actually 19ms from server to client and 1ms from client to server. And latency in application terms is not the same as in networking terms - you may be able to ping a certain machine and get a response in 20ms but if you're contacting a server on that machine that only processes network input 50 times a second then your responses will be delayed by an extra 0 to 20ms, and this will vary rather unpredictably.
That's not to say latency measurement it doesn't have a place in smoothing predictions out, but it's not going to solve your problem, just clean it up a bit.
On the face of it, the problem here seems to be that that you're sent information in the first message which you use to extrapolate data from until the last message is received. If all else stays constant then the movement vector given in the first message multiplied by the time between the messages will give the server the correct end position that the client was in at roughly now-(latency/2). But if the latency changes at all, the time between the messages will grow or shrink. The client may know he's moved 10 units, but the server simulated him moving 9 or 11 units before being told to snap him back to 10 units.
The general solution to this is to not assume that latency will stay constant but to send periodic position updates, which allow the server to verify and correct the client's position. With just 2 messages as you have now, all the error is found and corrected after the 2nd message. With more messages, the error is spread over many more sample points allowing for smoother and less visible correction.
It can never be perfect though: all it takes is a lag spike in the last millisecond of movement and the server's representation will overshoot. You can't get around that if you're predicting future movement based on past events, as there's no real alternative to choosing either correct-but-late or incorrect-but-timely since information takes time to travel. (Blame Einstein.)
One thing to keep in mind when using ICMP based pings is that networking equipment will often give ICMP traffic lower priority than normal packets, especially when the packets cross network boundaries such as WAN links. This can lead to pings being dropped or showing higher latency than traffic is actually experiencing and lends itself to being an indicator of problems rather than a measurement tool.
The increasing use of Quality of Service (QoS) in networks only exacerbates this and as a consequence though ping still remains a useful tool, it needs to be understood that it may not be a true reflection of the network latency for non-ICMP based real traffic.
There is a good post at the Itrinegy blog How do you measure Latency (RTT) in a network these days? about this.
You could use the already available Ping Class. Should be preferred over writing your own IMHO.
Have a "ping" command, where you send a message from the server to the client, then time how long it takes to get a response. Barring CPU overload scenarios, it should be pretty reliable. To get the one-way trip time, just divide the time by 2.
We can measure the round-trip time using the Ping class of the .NET Framework.
Instantiate a Ping and subscribe to the PingCompleted event:
Ping pingSender = new Ping();
pingSender.PingCompleted += PingCompletedCallback;
Add code to configure and action the ping.
Our PingCompleted event handler (PingCompletedEventHandler) has a PingCompletedEventArgs argument. The PingCompletedEventArgs.Reply gets us a PingReply object. PingReply.RoundtripTime returns the round trip time (the "number of milliseconds taken to send an Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) echo request and receive the corresponding ICMP echo reply message"):
public static void PingCompletedCallback(object sender, PingCompletedEventArgs e)
{
...
Console.WriteLine($"Roundtrip Time: {e.Reply.RoundtripTime}");
...
}
Code-dump of a full working example, based on MSDN's example. I have modified it to write the RTT to the console:
public static void Main(string[] args)
{
string who = "www.google.com";
AutoResetEvent waiter = new AutoResetEvent(false);
Ping pingSender = new Ping();
// When the PingCompleted event is raised,
// the PingCompletedCallback method is called.
pingSender.PingCompleted += PingCompletedCallback;
// Create a buffer of 32 bytes of data to be transmitted.
string data = "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa";
byte[] buffer = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(data);
// Wait 12 seconds for a reply.
int timeout = 12000;
// Set options for transmission:
// The data can go through 64 gateways or routers
// before it is destroyed, and the data packet
// cannot be fragmented.
PingOptions options = new PingOptions(64, true);
Console.WriteLine("Time to live: {0}", options.Ttl);
Console.WriteLine("Don't fragment: {0}", options.DontFragment);
// Send the ping asynchronously.
// Use the waiter as the user token.
// When the callback completes, it can wake up this thread.
pingSender.SendAsync(who, timeout, buffer, options, waiter);
// Prevent this example application from ending.
// A real application should do something useful
// when possible.
waiter.WaitOne();
Console.WriteLine("Ping example completed.");
}
public static void PingCompletedCallback(object sender, PingCompletedEventArgs e)
{
// If the operation was canceled, display a message to the user.
if (e.Cancelled)
{
Console.WriteLine("Ping canceled.");
// Let the main thread resume.
// UserToken is the AutoResetEvent object that the main thread
// is waiting for.
((AutoResetEvent)e.UserState).Set();
}
// If an error occurred, display the exception to the user.
if (e.Error != null)
{
Console.WriteLine("Ping failed:");
Console.WriteLine(e.Error.ToString());
// Let the main thread resume.
((AutoResetEvent)e.UserState).Set();
}
Console.WriteLine($"Roundtrip Time: {e.Reply.RoundtripTime}");
// Let the main thread resume.
((AutoResetEvent)e.UserState).Set();
}
You might want to perform several pings and then calculate an average, depending on your requirements of course.

Categories