Just to throw in my 2 cents, it seems all the rage now is non-blocking I/O event loop systems, such as node.js, or that matter, any eventloop system. You don't wait on socket reads, ever. You check to see if something is there, with a proper sysread, and if not, move on to the next event in the loop.

From my prelimary studies of the new techniques, it seems that upon socket connection, the server issues a promise to deliver the requested data, and the eventloop reads it chunk by chunk as it comes in. Then, there are various ways to detect if a socket has gone stale, or broken.

But I would advise using something like AnyEvent or Glib, which are 2 well documented and used eventloop systems.

You might find this interesting. It shows how to use a couple of GUI based event loop systems. Simple threaded chat server