{Qt 4.7.0 , VS 2010}

I have a Server written in Qt and a 3rd party client executable. Qt based server uses QTcpServer and QTcpSocket facilities (non-blocking).

Going through the articles on TCP I understand the following: the original implementation of TCP mentioned the negotiable window size to be a 16-bit value, thus maximum being 65535 bytes. But implementations often used the RFC window-scale-extension that allows the sliding window size to be scalable by bit-shifting to yield a maximum of 1 gigabyte. This is implementation defined. This could have resulted in majorly different window sizes on receiver and sender end as the server uses Qt facilities without hardcoding any window size limit. Client 1st asks for all information it can based on the previous messages from the server before handling the new (accumulating) incoming messages. So at some point Server receives a lot of messages each asking for data of several MB's. This the server processes and puts it into the sender buffer. Client however is unable to handle the messages at the same pace and it seems that client’s receiver buffer is far smaller (65535 bytes maybe) than sender’s transmit window size. The messages thus get accumulated at sender’s end until the sender’s buffer is full too after which the TCP writes on sender would block. This however does not happen as sender buffer is much larger. Hence this manifests as increase in memory consumption on the sender’s end.

To prevent this from happening, I used Qt’s socket’s waitForBytesWritten() with timeout set to -1 for infinite waiting period. This as I see from the behaviour blocks the thread writing TCP data until the data has actually been sensed by the receiver’s window (which will happen when earlier messages have been processed by the client at application level). This has caused memory consumption at Server end to be almost negligible.

is there a better alternative to this (in Qt) if i want to restrict the memory consumption at server end to say x MB's? Also please point out if any of my understandings is incorrect.