how much size of data can be send in tidtcpclient in delphi xe7

Question

I'm using Delphi XE7 for developing mobile application. And I'm using TIdtcpClient component to interact with the Server application. And I need to know for Android mobile & iOs mobile app, what is maximum size of data which I can send at a time to server. Or it depends on the speed of the internet. Please help me in this

Answer 1

TCP sockets are data streams, the length of the transmitted data is unlimited. For data with fixed length, client and server have to know when the stream ends, either by sending length information first before sending the actual data, or by using a end-of-data symbol / terminator sequence. You can also send an 'endless' stream, for example live audio / video data, which continues until one side disconnects.

Answer 2

There is no theoretical size limit to data that you can sent. Limitations are because of system resources/processing power, bandwidth availability and of course time that it takes to send.

System resources in the case of mobile devices will be memory, cpu power and data availability (cost per data) as it will most probably be for other platforms as well. Another resource that influences performance is the developer; the worst he writes the app the worst it will perform.

Bandwidth availability will determine how fast that chunk of data can be sent which directly influences the time it takes. Who wants to wait forever, right?

One more thing that is important, is the recipient. How patient the recipient is and how much resources he has also influences how much data you can send him.

So if you have plenty of time and resources then you will be able to send large amounts of data.

The Indy suite which TidTCPClient is part of, uses TidBytes as a memory data container into which an array of bytes is stored (the bytes that make up your data). Those TidBytes arrays are used to hold the data that you send or the data that you receive. They are handed to TidTCPClient when sending or receiving. The size of TidBytes arrays are once again limited by resources of the sender/receiver. If that causes an issue then you can break the data into smaller chunks then send them one-after-the-other. As long as you indicate to the recipient how big each chunk is, as mentioned by mjm and in the case of segmented sends you must also indicate which segment goes where in the complete data stream. A way of indicating to the recipient is to prefix the size of the data as either a byte, word or integer to the start of the entire package that you will send and as long as the server knows to either read the first byte, word or integer he will know how much data will follow that indicator and thus know how much data to expect as actual usable data.

Seeing that you might not know how much resources the recipient has it is wise to always break large amounts of data up into smaller chunks. This unfortunately is something that you will have to test to figure out how large. Also keep in mind the technology that will be used to send it across. For example Ethernet has certain packet sizes and if data is broken up into too small sizes it might cause too much overhead. The trick is to try and find the balance. Do not worry about that too much but do read up on it.