Receiving packets heavily lags after a moment

[LuisMayo]

When sending and receiving messages at high rates the receiver quickly starts having trouble receiving the messages.

I've made a minimum reproduction repo to showcase this problem: https://github.com/LuisMayo/laminar-testing-latency If you launch a "server" with cargo run and a client with cargo run -- --client a server and a client will run. The client sending messages each 16ms and both of them printing how much time has passed since last sent/received message

If you run them for a while you'll see how the "server" starts outputting higher time differences

Using --release mode doesn't seem to be of any help. Even if the test uses 16ms. First time I encountered the problem was in fact at a much lower frequency as I was running some tests for a game, each 333ms.

My machine information as output by neofetch

OS: Linux Mint 21.2 x86_64 
Host: 20RA0016SP ThinkPad E14 
Kernel: 5.15.0-89-generic 
Uptime: 2 days, 2 hours, 20 mins 
Packages: 3144 (dpkg), 32 (flatpak) 
Shell: bash 5.1.16 
Resolution: 1920x1080 
DE: Cinnamon 5.8.4 
WM: Mutter (Muffin) 
WM Theme: Mint-Y-Dark-Purple (Mint-Y) 
Theme: Mint-X-Purple [GTK2/3] 
Icons: Mint-Y-Teal [GTK2/3] 
Terminal: gnome-terminal 
CPU: Intel i5-10210U (8) @ 4.200GHz 
GPU: Intel CometLake-U GT2 [UHD Graphics] 

[VanderBieu]

I have encountered similar issue. My case is that I was trying to send multiple images (single image 70kb), it could no longer received any packet right after around 5 images sent.

[Dan2552]

I was able to reproduce (MacOS arm64; M1) using your example, however adding the following appears to prevent the freezing behavior:

 fn serve() {
     let mut socket = Socket::bind(format!("127.0.0.1:9999")).unwrap();
     let rec = socket.get_event_receiver();
+    let send = socket.get_packet_sender();
     thread::spawn(move || socket.start_polling());
     loop {
+        send.send(Packet::unreliable_sequenced("127.0.0.1:9998".parse().unwrap(), vec![], None));
         let instant = Instant::now();
         let _msg = rec.recv();
         println!("{:?}", instant.elapsed().as_millis());

(I'm not familiar as to why the server sending back messages does this, I just couldn't reproduce it in the example included in the repo, and so tried to work out the difference in behavior and it seemed to be this)

Here's a more full example (derived from this repo's example with your Instant printing):

use std::env::args_os;
use std::time::Duration;
use std::thread;
use std::time::Instant;

use laminar::{ErrorKind, Packet, Socket, SocketEvent};

const SERVER: &str = "127.0.0.1:12351";

fn server() -> Result<(), ErrorKind> {
    let mut socket = Socket::bind(SERVER)?;
    let (sender, receiver) = (socket.get_packet_sender(), socket.get_event_receiver());
    let _thread = thread::spawn(move || socket.start_polling());

    let mut instant = Instant::now();

    loop {
        if let Ok(event) = receiver.recv() {
            match event {
                SocketEvent::Packet(packet) => {
                    let msg = packet.payload();
                    let msg = String::from_utf8_lossy(msg);
                    let ip = packet.addr().ip();

                    println!("Received {:?} from {:?} ({:?})", msg, ip, instant.elapsed().as_millis());
                    instant = Instant::now();
                    sender
                        .send(Packet::reliable_ordered(
                            packet.addr(),
                            format!("Copy that! -- {}", msg).as_bytes().to_vec(),
                            None
                        ))
                        .expect("This should send");
                }
                SocketEvent::Timeout(address) => {
                    println!("Client timed out: {}", address);
                }
                _ => {}
            }
        }
        thread::sleep(Duration::from_millis(1));
    }
}

fn client() -> Result<(), ErrorKind> {
    let addr = "127.0.0.1:12352";
    let mut socket = Socket::bind(addr)?;
    println!("Connected on {}", addr);

    let server = SERVER.parse().unwrap();

    let mut n = 0;

    let mut instant = Instant::now();

    loop {
        let line = format!("hello {}", n);
        n += 1;

        socket.send(Packet::reliable_ordered(
            server,
            line.clone().into_bytes(),
            None
        ))?;

        socket.manual_poll(Instant::now());

        match socket.recv() {
            Some(SocketEvent::Packet(packet)) => {
                if packet.addr() == server {
                    println!("Server sent: {} ({})", String::from_utf8_lossy(packet.payload()), instant.elapsed().as_millis());
                    instant = Instant::now();
                } else {
                    println!("Unknown sender.");
                }
            }
            Some(SocketEvent::Timeout(_)) => {}
            _ => println!("Silence.."),
        }

        thread::sleep(Duration::from_millis(1));
    }
}

fn main() {
    if args_os().any(|element| element == "--client") {
        println!("Client!");
        let _ = client();
    } else {
        let _ = server();
    }
}