At work I am taking on some development stuff on the beaglebone black and I have to learn Python. I've had a blast so far!!
So I'm trying to understand what some of the code is doing. I have a sample script that opens a port and listens for connections (the server side), and I read through the code and I get to this:
#Receiving from client data = conn.recv(4096)
What I am trying to understand is what the 4096 number is doing. I have googled around and found things like this: https://docs.python.org/2/library/socket.html
Which tell me that it's a buffer size, should be a relatively small power of 2, like 4096.
In all honesty, I still have no clue what it's doing.
So does it simply buffer the data stream as it comes out - and the data stream could be a single byte or many MB of data?
Does the 4096 bytes mean I can't receive more than 4096 bytes of data at a time? To get more than 4096 do I need to make a loop to read 4096 byte chunks of data as the data is being sent?
The code seems to work just fine, but I want to know what that 4096 actually means.