How do I increase the buffer size for domain sockets in OS X 10.6

Question

In Linux I have no problem dumping tons of data into a domain socket, but the same code on OS X 10.6.2 blows up after about 65 records. The socket reader code looks like

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use IO::Socket;

unlink "foo";
my $sock = IO::Socket::UNIX->new (
        Local    => 'foo',
        Type     => SOCK_DGRAM,
        Timeout  => 600,
) or die "Could not create socket: $!\n";

while (<$sock>) {
        chomp;
        print "[$_]\n";
}

And the client code looks like

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use warnings;

use IO::Socket;

my $sock = IO::Socket::UNIX->new (
    Peer     => 'foo',
    Type     => SOCK_DGRAM,
    Timeout  => 600,
) or die "Could not create socket: $!\n";

for my $i (1 .. 1_000_000) {
    print $sock "$i\n" or die $!;
}

close $sock;

The error message I get is No buffer space available at write.pl line 15.. It seems fairly obvious that there is a difference in the buffer size between Linux and OS X, but I don't know how to set it OS X (or what the possible negative side effects might be).

Answer 1

This code is really not good code. It sends packets as fast as it can, and it will run out of buffer space. I don't know why linux doesn't, but that's an oddity, not something to rely on.

Increasing buffer space won't help, it will just hide the bad code.

Answer 2

You can try

sysctl -w kern.ipc.maxsockbuf=8000000
sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.sendspace=4000000
sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.recvspace=4000000

but I would heed the suggestion from Michael Graff that you should include some backoff and retry logic in your application code