.net - What is a good buffer size for socket programming?

Question

We are using .Net and sockets. The server is using the Socket.Sender(bytes[]) method so it just sends the entire payload. On the other side we are clients consuming the data. Socket.Receive(buffer[]). In all the examples from Microsoft (and others) they seem to stick with a buffer size of 8192. We have used this size but every now and then we are sending data down to the clients that exceeds this buffer size.

Is there a way of determining how much data the server's sent method sent us? What is the best buffer size?

Answer 1

Even if you're sending more data than that, it may well not be available in one call to Receive.

You can't determine how much data the server has sent - it's a stream of data, and you're just reading chunks at a time. You may read part of what the server sent in one Send call, or you may read the data from two Send calls in one Receive call. 8K is a reasonable buffer size - not so big that you'll waste a lot of memory, and not so small that you'll have to use loads of wasted Receive calls. 4K or 16K would quite possibly be fine too... I personally wouldn't start going above 16K for network buffers - I suspect you'd rarely fill them.

You could experiment by trying to use a very large buffer and log how many bytes were received in each call - that would give you some idea of how much is generally available - but it wouldn't really show the effect of using a smaller buffer. What concerns do you have over using an 8K buffer? If it's performance, do you have any evidence that this aspect of your code is a performance bottleneck?