Scatter/Gather I/O Support
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4/8/2010
The WSASend, WSASendTo, WSARecv, and WSARecvFrom functions all take an array of application buffers as input parameters and can be used for scatter/gather (or vectored) I/O. This can be very useful in instances where portions of each message being transmitted consist of one or more fixed-length headers in addition to a message body. Such headers need not be concatenated by the application into a single contiguous buffer prior to sending. Likewise on receiving, the headers can be automatically split off into separate buffers, leaving the message body pure.
When receiving into multiple buffers, completion occurs as data arrives from the network, regardless of whether all the supplied buffers are utilized.