--- Received from FPU.CLARKC1 0115-9810103 11-02-02 00:05

  -> IN=curl-library_at_lists.sourceforge.net

Hi!

Here's the scene - as yet entirely theoretical, since at this point in
time I've never coded even so much as a single libcurl API call - but if
I get a good answer to this question, there'll be no stopping me!

I have a multithreaded app. It's on Windows NT. It talks HTTPS to a Web
server. Each thread talks to the same Web server, and only ever to that
same Web server. My threads are long-lived (they each last for the
lifetime of the app). Each thread has its own curl (easy) handle. When
each thread starts up, it creates its own curl handle, and then sets up
filenames on that handle for a client certificate, a client private key
and password, and a trusted server certificate, using curl_easy_setopt
calls.

The values of these filenames, passwords, etc, given by each thread are
identical (each thread is using a single client certificate and key, to
represent itself - a single client application - to the Web server, and
a single trusted server certificate to represent the one and only Web
server it talks to).

At a high rate of knots after that, my threads are called (in no
particular order, but in rapid succession) and a called thread will fire
off a single HTTPS URL to the (one and only) Web server. When the thread
gets the response, and processes it, it goes back to sleep for a while,
until it's prodded into life again.

My question is this - for each thread, how many times do the various
files (client certificate, client key, and server certificate) get read
in physically from disk? Is it only once each per thread (for the first
time the thread gets called to issue a URL)? That would be really neat,
as it would indicate a fantastic caching deal going on somewhere, either
in libcurl, or OpenSSL, or possibly both.

Or would it be what I fear, which is three disk reads (one per file),
per thread, per requested URL? Yes I know that even then I'd probably
get a good deal from a goodly-sized disk cache, but I'd like this thing
to really fly if I can make it.

Any takers? Thanks in advance for any illumination you can shed.

Chris

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Received on 2002-02-11