Lua sockets - Asynchronous Events

Question

In current lua sockets implementation, I see that we have to install a timer that calls back periodically so that we check in a non blocking API to see if we have received a

Answer 1

You are probably using a non-blocking select() to "poll" sockets for any new data available. Luasocket doesn't provide any other interface to see if there is new data available (as far as I know), but if you are concerned that it's taking too much time when you are doing this 10 times per second, consider writing a simplified version that only checks one socket you need and avoids creating and throwing away Lua tables. If that's not an option, consider passing nil to select() instead of {} for those lists you don't need to read and pass static tables instead of temporary ones:

local rset = {socket}
... later
...select(rset, nil, 0)

instead of

...select({socket}, {}, 0)