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In the boost asio documentation for strands it says:

Strands may be either implicit or explicit, as illustrated by the following alternative approaches:

• ...
• Where there is a single chain of asynchronous operations associated with a connection (e.g. in a half duplex protocol implementation like HTTP) there is no possibility of concurrent execution of the handlers. This is an implicit strand.
• ...

However, in boost beast's example for a multithreaded asynchronous http server the boost::asio::ip::tcp::acceptor as well as each boost::asio::ip::tcp::socket get their own strand explicitly (see line 373 and 425). As far as I can see, this should not be necessary, since all of these objects are only ever going to be accessed in sequentially registered/running CompletionHandlers.¹ Precisely, a new async operation for one of these objects is only ever registered at the end of a CompletionHandler registered on the same object, making any object be used in a single chain of asynchronous operations.²

Thus, I'd assume that - despite of multiple threads running concurrently - strands could be omitted all together in this example and the io_context may be used for scheduling any async operation directly. Is that correct? If not, what issues of synchronization am I missing? Am I misunderstanding the statement in the documentation above?

¹: Of course, two sockets or a socket and the acceptor may be worked with concurrently but due to the use of multiple stands this is not prevented in the example either.

²: Admittedly, the CompletionHandler registered at the end of the current CompletionHandler may be started on another thread before the current handler actually finished, i. e. returns. But I would assume that this is not a circumstance risking synchronization problems. Correct me, if I am wrong.

I am spawning a coroutine as shown below.

In the following example I start a worker thread for my application. Later I post some work to it. To prevent it from returning prematurely I have to ensure "work" is outstanding. I do this with a work_guard object. However I have found two other ways to "ensure" work. Which one should I use throughout my application? Is there any difference?

Reference: https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_35_0/doc/html/boost_asio/reference/basic_socket_acceptor/async_accept/overload1.html

I'm using asio (non-boost) to create a TCP server and while my code works it's not done properly because I'm calling asio::async_write from multiple threads. I think I should use strands but the more I read about that the more lost I am.

I'm trying to send https web requests with Asio and OpenSSL. My code is working fine on most of the sites I tried it on, but on some others, I get an error during the handshake handshake: wrong version number (SSL routines, ssl3_get_record).

I've found some people having this issue because they were behind proxies or because they tried to connect to port 80 instead of port 443, but this is not the case here (as far as I know) because the exact same code (see below for minimal example) works for most of the sites I tried it on.

I've tried to check with wireshark to see if I could spot the difference between a case with and one without the error. Here what I found:

• when it works, TLSv1.2 or 1.3 is used, when it doesn't, it's TLSv1
• when it doesn't work, the DNS query shows a cloudfront cname redirection, but the endpoint used for the socket matches the redirection

Based on these observations, I know my code is capable of using TLSv1.3, and I thought that using TLSv1 was the issue. So I tried to force asio to use a version > 1 for TLS with asio::ssl::context::tlsv13_client when creating the context, or by adding asio::ssl::context::no_tlsv1 to set_options, but wireshark still showed that a TLSv1 protocol was used.

For the second point, I'm not too familiar with web stuff, so I'm not sure what conclusion I can make about that, or even if it's relevant to the issue.

Minimal working example:

If set up a program with boost asio. Broadcasts are working fine, if only one network interface is present. However, if there are more network interfaces each broadcast is being sent on one interface only. The interface changes randomly. As observed by wireshark.

I'd expect each broadcast to go out on every interface.

Who's wrong? Me, boost or my understanding of how to use boost. Well, I'm aware, that the latter is the most probable :).

And how can I get the expected behavior.

When looking through boost asio co_spawn documentation (https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_78_0/doc/html/boost_asio/reference/co_spawn/overload6.html), I see this statement, "Spawn a new coroutined-based thread of execution", however my understanding is that co_spawn does not create an actual thread, but uses threads that are part of the boost::asio::io_context pool. It's a "coroutine-based thread of execution" in a sense, that this coroutine would be a root of all coroutines that are spawned from inside this one

Is my understanding correct here or an actual thread is created whenever co_spawn is used like this: