General question about parallel threading in C++

I haven't used threading in my program before. But there is a problem I am having with this 3rd party application.

It is an offsite backup solution and it has a server and many clients. We have an admin console to manage all the clients and that is where there is a problem.

If one of the client side application gets stuck, or is running in a broken condition, the admin console waits forever to get a response and does not display anything.

$for(client= client1; client < last_client; client++){ if (getOServConnection(client, &socHandler)!=NULL) { .. } }

I want two solutions to thi开发者_开发知识库s. I want to know if there is anyway, I can set a timeout for the function getOServConnection, so that I get a response within X seconds.

And, I want to know how to call this function in parallel for all clients, so that I get the response from all clients within X seconds.

the getOServConnection contains a WSAConnect call, and I don't want to use any options on the socket, since it is used by other modules and it will affect the application severely.

First.. If you move the call that hangs into a separate thread you can use the main thread for starting a timer an waiting for the timeout. If you are using Visual C++ and if you are in Win32 you can use the (rather old) MFC based timer. Once this timer expires it will launch a function call OnTimer. This timer does not affect your application's main thread as it works in a different system based thread.

Second.. If you need to start any number of threads with that connection you should start thinking of a design pattern to use for that. You could use a fixed number of threads, and in that case you may want to use a object pool. Or if the number of threads is (relatively) limitless you may want to use a factory method