I have a driver that needs to distribute data to 42 receivers. As that amount is variable and creating a driver with 42 fixed ports is too much, so the choice has been made to work through a multi-threaded serial timer. Every second it will be sending data.

This is working good to distribute the data, however there is one problem: every time data gets sent it's opening and closing a new TCP socket. This means opening 42 sockets and Windows by default reserves such a socket for 4 minutes so we're running out of ports.

Is there a way for a multi-threaded serial timer to keep the socket open and re-use this? Kind of link an opened socket to a row in a table over which the multi-threaded timer iterates.

The driver does not wait for a response (only sends commands), could this be a cause and could the solution be to let the receiving side send back a response?

Could a multi-threaded http timer be a solution with keep alive defined?

Other alternative that I can think about, but like to avoid, would be to open the TCP socket in the QAction and leave them open there. I would like to avoid going through SLScripting and use the core software to handle the connection through SLPort instead.