Since v3.2 lws no longer requires periodic checking for timeouts and other events. A new system was refactored in where future events are scheduled on to a single, unified, sorted linked-list in time order, with everything at us resolution.

This makes it very cheap to know when the next scheduled event is coming and restrict the poll wait to match, or for event libraries set a timer to wake at the earliest event when returning to the event loop.

Everything that was checked periodically was converted to use lws_sul and schedule its own later event. The end result is when lws is idle, it will stay asleep in the poll wait until a network event or the next scheduled lws_sul event happens, which is optimal for power.

Side effect for older code

If your older code uses lws_service_fd(), it used to be necessary to call this with a NULL pollfd periodically to indicate you wanted to let the background checks happen. lws_sul eliminates the whole concept of periodic checking and NULL is no longer a valid pollfd value for this and related apis.

Using <tt>lws_sul</tt> in user code

See minimal-http-client-multi for an example of using the lws_sul scheduler from your own code; it uses it to spread out connection attempts so they are staggered in time. You must create an lws_sorted_usec_list_t object somewhere, eg, in you own existing object.

static lws_sorted_usec_list_t sul_stagger;

Create your own callback for the event... the argument points to the sul object used when the callback was scheduled. You can use pointer arithmetic to translate that to your own struct when the lws_sorted_usec_list_t was a member of the same struct.

static void
stagger_cb(lws_sorted_usec_list_t *sul)
{
...
}

When you want to schedule the callback, use lws_sul_schedule()... this will call it 10ms in the future

lws_sul_schedule(context, 0, &sul_stagger, stagger_cb, 10 * LWS_US_PER_MS);

In the case you destroy your object and need to cancel the scheduled callback, use

lws_sul_schedule(context, 0, &sul_stagger, NULL, LWS_SET_TIMER_USEC_CANCEL);