Hello, I am starting to learn and play around with tokio and multithreaded code. I am now playing around with websockets, I don’t quite understand the difference between broadcast and mpsc, and when would you use either, I mean, I am assuming broadcast is intended for multiple clients, but multiple clients were able to connect to my mscp channel, and receive a bit of data (but it was weird and partial). So I don’t quite get it.
Tokio’s broadcast module is a mpmc messaging queue.
The terms “mpsc” and “mpmc” refer to how the channels can be used. Breaking down the letters, there are two sides to a channel:
pis producer, or transmitter/sender. This side sends datacis consumer, or receiver/reader. This side receives data.Data only flows one way through a channel. Each side may have a restriction on how many members can be on that side:
sis single, so this side cannot be cloned. You only have one object that can interact with this side (so only one sender or only one receiver)mis multiple, so this side can be cloned. Any number of objects can exist that interact with this side (so a bunch of simultaneous senders or receivers)A mpsc channel can only have one consumer, so only one thread can receive messages at a time, and it can only receive those messages once.
A mpmc channel can have many consumers, so multiple threads can receive messages at once, and a thread can receive a message multiple times (through multiple receivers).
Both can have multiple simultaneous producers.