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C Academy · Lesson

Handling Multiple Clients

select and poll.

The Concurrency Problem

A simple server handles one client at a time. If a client is slow, everyone else waits. To serve many clients concurrently, you need a different model.

Approaches to Concurrency

Three common strategies:

  • Thread/process per client: simple but heavy at scale
  • I/O multiplexing with select or poll: one thread watches many sockets
  • Event loops with epoll/kqueue: scales to thousands

All lessons in this course

  1. Sockets Overview
  2. TCP Server
  3. TCP Client
  4. Handling Multiple Clients
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