Python socket receive - incoming packets always have a different size

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I'm using the SocketServer module for a TCP server. I'm experiencing some issue here with the recv() function, because the incoming packets always have a different size, so if I specify recv(1024) (I tried with a bigger value, and smaller), it gets stuck after 2 or 3 requests because the packet length will be smaller (I think), and then the server gets stuck until a timeout.

class Test(SocketServer.BaseRequestHandler):

def handle(self):

   print "From:", self.client_address

   while True:    

     data = self.request.recv(1024)
     if not data: break

     if data[4] == "\x20":              
       self.request.sendall("hello")
     if data[4] == "\x21":
       self.request.sendall("bye")
     else:
       print "unknow packet"
   self.request.close()
   print "Disconnected", self.client_address

launch = SocketServer.ThreadingTCPServer(('', int(sys.argv[1])),Test)

launch.allow_reuse_address= True;

launch.serve_forever()

If the client sends multiples requests over the same source port, but the server gets stuck, any help would be very appreciated, thank !

7 Answers

You could try always sending the first 4 bytes of your data as data size and then read complete data in one shot. Use the below functions on both client and server-side to send and receive data.

def send_data(conn, data):
    serialized_data = pickle.dumps(data)
    conn.sendall(struct.pack('>I', len(serialized_data)))
    conn.sendall(serialized_data)


def receive_data(conn):
    data_size = struct.unpack('>I', conn.recv(4))[0]
    received_payload = b""
    reamining_payload_size = data_size
    while reamining_payload_size != 0:
        received_payload += conn.recv(reamining_payload_size)
        reamining_payload_size = data_size - len(received_payload)
    data = pickle.loads(received_payload)

    return data

you could find sample program at https://github.com/vijendra1125/Python-Socket-Programming.git

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