Read from AsyncTcpSocket in separate Thread

[iEAmi]

Hi.
How can I split read and write (each one in dedicate thread) for AsyncTcpSocket?

[eduard-vasinskyi]

Hi, @iEAmi

AsyncTcpSocket is meant to be used inside an Eventloop. An Eventloop runs in a single thread, so every operation on AsyncTcpSocket should be performed from within that thread. This is the main idea behind using AsyncTcpSocket in the first place.

However, if you absolutely need to read from the AsyncTcpSocket in a separate thread, you can use a converter. First, you would need to convert the socket to a ChannelSupplier. Then you can convert a ChannelSupplier to a regular InputStream which can be used from a non-Eventloop thread.

A code could look something like this:

Eventloop eventloop = Eventloop.getCurrentEventloop();
ChannelSupplier<ByteBuf> channelSupplier = ChannelSupplier.ofSocket(socket);
 
Thread thread = new Thread(() -> {
  try (InputStream inputStream = ChannelSuppliers.channelSupplierAsInputStream(eventloop, channelSupplier)) {
     // read from 'inputStream'
  }
});

thread.start();

Although, the performance will be worse than reading directly inside the Eventloop thread. I would suggest reading the data from the socket inside the Eventloop thread, and then passing all the read data to a separate thread for processing.