server, client debugging

Question

I'm writing a multiprocess server in C and an I'm just wondering what are the best tools to debug and test my programs? Specifically what is being sent to the client and vise versa. Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

Every process should write log. It's not exactly a debugging tool like gdb, but very-very useful.

Every log entry should contain a precise timestamp, the process ID, and socket data. You can write the log to file(s), to database, maybe to a log server. Logging to a database (e.g. SQLite) is useful because it's easy to filter the log for specific time range, for specific client connection etc. It's also easy to merge the log of different processes (SQLite: ATTACH DATABASE). On Linux, I would consider using syslog.

Specify different logging levels. Detailed logging helps to debug your code in the development phase. Basic logging will help you tracking down rare errors which will emerge in the long term. Make sure you can turn on and off logging and set logging levels easily, without turning off your server.