doubt about POSIX Timers

[titusabraham]

I have basically 2 questions which is mentioned below

1. how to pass arguments to a Timer. When we create a timer , we tie it up to a function , but When the timer expires i need some arguments to be passed to the function. for example. if the function which timer is calling needs the value of the connection id how do i pass it by timer ?

2. this is more of a design issue which I feel many of the guys here must have faced it at some point. For a particular implementation a process needs to send a UDP packet if a client doesn't send at the appropriate times. Since there were multiple clients i thought of associating each client with a timer and one process which takes in charge of creating, resetting them . Is this an OK design or is there any flaws ?

waiting for a reply..
titus

[Rubberman]

What may be the "best" design for something like this is a matter of resources. If you have hundreds of connections, then having a timer associated with each connection is probably not a good idea, but would be better off with a single timer that is set to expire when the next connection needs to be services, keeping information about the time to expire for each connection in some data structure that is updated each time the timer expires. If you only have a few connections, then having a timer for each is not a bad idea and requires less complex programming than the other method.

Anyway, please show the posix timer functions you are using, and how you are using them.