In article <f4********************@giganews.com>, Marcel Brekelmans
wrote:
But what if the 'delivering' process is feeding data
in unknown quantities and in an irregular pattern?
Data arrives in packets that are split based on how much data the
sending process supplies at a time but that may also be split while
they're in transit. As far as the receiving application is concerned,
the receive completes when a LAN packet is received. If there's more
data, that is handled on the next receive.
If you're using TCP, the protocol is designed to handle a logically
continuous stream of octets/bytes without marked message start/finish.
It's important to understand that packets may be arbitrarily split
while in transit (or for that matter, by one of the end point hosts).
Applications typically split data into messages by including either a
message length or an end of message flag.
Hope this helps.
Mike