I understand the basics of POSIX networking and sockets, but I want to build a stronger foundation in multithreading as it applies to network programming. I have already looked at Beej's Guide and would appreciate recommendations for books, documentation, tutorials, or practical exercises covering threads, synchronization, concurrency models, and techniques such as thread pools or epoll.
2 Answers
A few solid references cover this intersection well. UNIX Network Programming, Volume 1 walks through several concurrent server designs, including thread-per-connection and pre-threaded approaches. The Linux Programming Interface has excellent chapters on POSIX threads, synchronization, sockets, and epoll. Programming with POSIX Threads is more advanced but useful as a detailed pthread reference. Also read the Linux man pages for pthreads, pthread_create, and epoll. Keep in mind that using one thread for every socket is easy to understand but often scales poorly; high-performance servers commonly combine epoll or io_uring with a small worker pool.
Before focusing specifically on networking, make sure threads, mutexes, condition variables, and synchronization make sense on their own. Then learn how those concepts fit with event-driven I/O. A good practical exercise is to implement the same TCP echo server three ways: one thread per connection, a fixed-size thread pool, and a single-threaded epoll version. Comparing their memory use, scheduling overhead, and behavior under many connections makes the tradeoffs much clearer.
I have used threads and locks before, but the underlying ideas still feel a bit shaky. I’m mainly looking for material that will help me develop a stronger foundation.