Flush stdin

[Marko Rauhamaa]

Dan Stromberg <drsalists at gmail.com>:

> On Mon, Oct 20, 2014 at 9:41 PM, Marko Rauhamaa <marko at pacujo.net> wrote:
>> Nagle affects the communication between the peer OS kernels and isn't
>> directly related to anything the application does.
>
> Actually, Nagle can cause two or more small packets to be merged,
> which is something an application must be able to deal with, because
> they could show up in the receiving application as one or more (but
> anyway: fewer) merged recv()'s.

Packets have barely anything to do with TCP sockets since they provide
an octet stream abstraction.

> Of course, but who's doing one byte per second?  You and I in our
> tests, and perhaps some application developers with remarkably
> undemanding I/O.  That doesn't really mean we should _recommend_ a
> series of os.read(0, 1)'s.

No, here's my statement: if you need to process input as soon as it
becomes available, you can't use sys.stdin. Instead, you need to use
os.read().

You typically supply os.read() with a buffer of a kilobyte or more. Key
is, os.read() returns right away if fewer bytes are available.


Marko