I'm aware that the ::send within a Linux TCP server can limit the sending of the payload such that ::send needs to be called multiple times until the entire payload is sent.
i.e. Payload is 1024 bytes
sent_bytes = ::send(fd, ...) where sent_bytes is only 256 bytes so this needs to be called again.
Is there any way to know exactly how many bytes can be sent before sending? If the socket will allow for the entire message, or that the message will be fragmented and by how much?
Example Case
2 messages are sent to the same socket by different threads at the same time on the same tcp client via ::send(). In some cases where messages are large multiple calls to ::send() are required as not all the bytes are sent at the initial call. Thus, go with the loop solution until all the bytes are sent. The loop is mutexed so can be seen as thread safe, so each thread has to perform the sending after the other. But, my worry is that beacuse Tcp is a stream the client will receive fragments of each message and I was thinking that adding framing to each message I could rebuild the message on the client side, if I knew how many bytes are sent at a time.
Although the call to ::send() is done sequentially, is the any chance that the byte stream is still mixed?
Effectively, could this happen:
Although the call to ::send() is done sequentially, is the any chance that the byte stream is still mixed?
Of course. Not only there's a chance of that, it is pretty much going to be a certainty, at one point or another. It's going to happen at one point. Guaranteed.
sent to the same socket by different threads
It will be necessary to handle the synchronization at this level, by employing a mutex that each thread locks before sending its message and unlocking it only after the entire message is sent.
It goes without sending that this leaves open a possibility that a blocked/hung socket will result in a single thread locking this mutex for an excessive amount of time, until the socket times out and your execution thread ends up dealing with a failed send() or write(), in whatever fashion it is already doing now (you are, of course, checking the return value from send/write, and handling the exception conditions appropriately).
There is no single, cookie-cutter, paint-by-numbers, solution to this that works in every situation, in every program, that needs to do something like this. Each eventual solution needs to be tailored based on each program's unique requirements and purpose. Just one possibility would be a dedicated execution thread that handles all socket input/output, and all your other execution threads sending their messages to the socket thread, instead of writing to the socket directly. This would avoid having all execution thread wedged by a hung socket, at expense of grown memory, that's holding all unsent data.
But that's just one possible approach. The number of possible, alternative solutions has no limit. You will need to figure out which logic/algorithm based solution will work best for your specific program. There is no operating system/kernel level indication that will give you any kind of a guarantee as to the amount of a send() or write() call on a socket will accept.