gethostbyname creates a thread?

Question

I am working in C++ with VS2008 and Win7.

While examining a program I was following the threads created, and it seems that gethostbyname() creates a thread for itself. Could you explain why?

On msdn is says: "The memory for the hostent structure returned by the gethostbyname function is allocated internally by the Winsock DLL from thread local storage. "

Does this memory fool visual studio into thinking it is a thread?

EDIT: It seems that from this link, and also from my observations that this also happens with the Connect function. I guess this is normal behavior.

The code below is from msdn [gethostbyname page] and it exhibits the same behavior.

int main(int argc, char **argv)    
{    
    //-----------------------------------------
    // Declare and initialize variables
    WSADATA wsaData;
    int iResult;

    DWORD dwError;
    int i = 0;

    struct hostent *remoteHost;
    char *host_name;
    struct in_addr addr;

    char **pAlias;

    // Validate the parameters
    if (argc != 2) {
        printf("usage: %s hostname\n", argv[0]);
        printf("  to return the IP addresses for the host\n");
        printf("       %s www.contoso.com\n", argv[0]);
        printf(" or\n");
        printf("       %s IPv4string\n", argv[0]);
        printf("  to return an IPv4 binary address for an IPv4string\n");
        printf("       %s 127.0.0.1\n", argv[0]);
        return 1;
    }
    // Initialize Winsock
    iResult = WSAStartup(MAKEWORD(2, 2), &wsaData);
    if (iResult != 0) {
        printf("WSAStartup failed: %d\n", iResult);
        return 1;
    }

    host_name = argv[1];

    printf("Calling gethostbyname with %s\n", host_name);
    remoteHost = gethostbyname(host_name);

    if (remoteHost == NULL) {
        dwError = WSAGetLastError();
        if (dwError != 0) {
            if (dwError == WSAHOST_NOT_FOUND) {
                printf("Host not found\n");
                return 1;
            } else if (dwError == WSANO_DATA) {
                printf("No data record found\n");
                return 1;
            } else {
                printf("Function failed with error: %ld\n", dwError);
                return 1;
            }
        }
    } else {
        printf("Function returned:\n");
        printf("\tOfficial name: %s\n", remoteHost->h_name);
        for (pAlias = remoteHost->h_aliases; *pAlias != 0; pAlias++) {
            printf("\tAlternate name #%d: %s\n", ++i, *pAlias);
        }
        printf("\tAddress type: ");
        switch (remoteHost->h_addrtype) {
            case AF_INET:
                printf("AF_INET\n");
            break;
            case AF_NETBIOS:
                printf("AF_NETBIOS\n");
            break;
            default:
                printf(" %d\n", remoteHost->h_addrtype);
            break;
        }
        printf("\tAddress length: %d\n", remoteHost->h_length);

        i = 0;
        if (remoteHost->h_addrtype == AF_INET)
        {
            while (remoteHost->h_addr_list[i] != 0) {
                addr.s_addr = *(u_long *) remoteHost->h_addr_list[i++];
                printf("\tIP Address #%d: %s\n", i, inet_ntoa(addr));
            }
        }
        else if (remoteHost->h_addrtype == AF_NETBIOS)
        {   
            printf("NETBIOS address was returned\n");
        }   
    }
    return 0;
}

Answer 1

AFAIK, gethostbyname blocks.

WinSock often creates some helper threads though.

Answer 2

No, the Thread-local storage is unrelated to the startup of a new thread.

The thread may be needed due to thread-affinity issues with sub-operations of the GetHostByName API, such as the need to use asynchronous callbacks without affecting the calling thread's re-entrancy.

Or it may be a lazy initialization feature of WinSock where a daemon thread needed for a subset of WinSock operations is needed, and this was the first API to require the daemon.