FOSDEM 2010

So Ruben has been working on getting a bunch of talks organised for the Mono room in FOSDEM and I've been lucky enough to get a slot. I have a 30 minute slot, so I figured that would be long enough to talk about 2 things properly and then take questions.

I've decided that I want to talk about two things.

1. The piece picker algorithm
2. How i handle threading

The piece picking code handles which segment of the file will be downloaded next. It has gone through several iterations, each time adding new features. Eventaully the whole class became so hard to maintain and test that I just had to rewrite things from the ground up using a new approach. This might give some people ideas on how to tackle problems in their own projects but even if it doesn't, it should still be interesting ;)

MonoTorrent handles a lot of concurrent connections. Using one thread per connection just wouldn't scale yet using plain asynchronous sockets and locking has huge potential for deadlocks and race conditions. Getting this right took well over a year - probably due to my lack of experience at this - but right now I think I've hit the winning threading solution. This part of the talk should be useful to anyone who's worked on an app which does a lot of socket operations. Maybe I'll wake up in a few months time and see a dozen apps using that technique.

Anyway, feel free to drop in for my talk (and all the others!). If you have any questions about any other aspects of MonoTorrent, or programming in general, feel free to find me and ask.