Pragmatic General Multicast on Winsock

Question

Has anyone any experience of using PGM at the winsock (not MSMQ) level on Windows? It looks like a useful reliable multicast protocol (a la TIBCO Rendezvous) and I assume that it would be possible to make something like this really fly if run over native completion-port based I/O.

I've dabbled with it, at a C++ level, by writing some boost::asio support and also got it going in C# via SocketAsyncEventArgs, but alas my meagre home-office set-up lacks a true LAN to test it out properly, and I wondered if anyone has spent anytime on it and has any observations?

Answer 1

Run away! We tried to use it for a project once and couldn't make it work. The biggest problem was some sort of pending I/O request hanging in the driver so you couldn't kill the process. Made it a bit difficult to debug.

this was Server 2003, and I doubt that it's better in 2008, but you could always try it there.

Answer 2

An alternative to the Microsoft stack on Windows is OpenPGM 2, also available on Linux and Solaris.

http://code.google.com/p/openpgm/