Daemonization ------------- There's a helper api lws_daemonize built by default that does everything you need to daemonize well, including creating a lock file. If you're making what's basically a daemon, just call this early in your init to fork to a headless background process and exit the starting process. Notice stdout, stderr, stdin are all redirected to /dev/null to enforce your daemon is headless, so you'll need to sort out alternative logging, by, eg, syslog. Maximum number of connections ----------------------------- The maximum number of connections the library can deal with is decided when it starts by querying the OS to find out how many file descriptors it is allowed to open (1024 on Fedora for example). It then allocates arrays that allow up to that many connections, minus whatever other file descriptors are in use by the user code. If you want to restrict that allocation, or increase it, you can use ulimit or similar to change the avaiable number of file descriptors, and when restarted libwebsockets will adapt accordingly. Procedure for sending data from other threads or process contexts ----------------------------------------------------------------- Libwebsockets is carefully designed to work with no blocking in a single thread. In some cases where you will add libwebsockets to something else that uses the same single thread approach, you can so a safe implementation by combining the poll() loops as described in "External Polling loop support" below. In other cases, you find you have asynchronous events coming from other thread or process contexts and there's not much you can do about it. If you just try to randomly send, or broadcast using libwebsockets_broadcast() from these other places things will blow up either quickly or when the events on the two threads interefere with each other. It's not legal to do this. For those situations, you can use libwebsockets_broadcast_foreign(). This serializes the data you're sending using a private, per-protocol socket, so the service thread picks it up when it's ready, and it is serviced from the service thread context only. Fragmented messages ------------------- To support fragmented messages you need to check for the final frame of a message with libwebsocket_is_final_fragment. This check can be combined with libwebsockets_remaining_packet_payload to gather the whole contents of a message, eg: case LWS_CALLBACK_RECEIVE: { Client * const client = (Client *)user; const size_t remaining = libwebsockets_remaining_packet_payload(wsi); if (!remaining && libwebsocket_is_final_fragment(wsi)) { if (client->HasFragments()) { client->AppendMessageFragment(in, len, 0); in = (void *)client->GetMessage(); len = client->GetMessageLength(); } client->ProcessMessage((char *)in, len, wsi); client->ResetMessage(); } else client->AppendMessageFragment(in, len, remaining); } break; The test app llibwebsockets-test-fraggle sources also show how to deal with fragmented messages. Debug Logging ------------- Also using lws_set_log_level api you may provide a custom callback to actually emit the log string. By default, this points to an internal emit function that sends to stderr. Setting it to NULL leaves it as it is instead. A helper function lwsl_emit_syslog() is exported from the library to simplify logging to syslog. You still need to use setlogmask, openlog and closelog in your user code. The logging apis are made available for user code. lwsl_err(...) lwsl_warn(...) lwsl_notice(...) lwsl_info(...) lwsl_debug(...) The difference between notice and info is that notice will be logged by default whereas info is ignored by default. External Polling Loop support ----------------------------- libwebsockets maintains an internal poll() array for all of its sockets, but you can instead integrate the sockets into an external polling array. That's needed if libwebsockets will cooperate with an existing poll array maintained by another server. Four callbacks LWS_CALLBACK_ADD_POLL_FD, LWS_CALLBACK_DEL_POLL_FD, LWS_CALLBACK_SET_MODE_POLL_FD and LWS_CALLBACK_CLEAR_MODE_POLL_FD appear in the callback for protocol 0 and allow interface code to manage socket descriptors in other poll loops.