Client and server processes

[poornima lagadapati]

A network application consists of pairs of processes that send messages to each

other over a network. For example, in the Web application a client browser

process exchanges messages with a Web server process. In a P2P file-sharing sys￾tem, a file is transferred from a process in one peer to a process in another peer.

For each pair of communicating processes, we typically label one of the two

processes as the client and the other process as the server. With the Web, a

browser is a client process and a Web server is a server process. With P2P file

sharing, the peer that is downloading the file is labeled as the client, and the peer

that is uploading the file is labeled as the server.

You may have observed that in some applications, such as in P2P file sharing, a

process can be both a client and a server. Indeed, a process in a P2P file-sharing sys￾tem can both upload and download files.

 

[Himanshi Agarwal]

The client process always initiates a connection to the server, while the server process always waits for requests from any client. When both the client process and server process are running on the same computer, this is called a single seat setup.