reading and writing socket problem

Hi!
I need to send a text to a socket and I should receive the responde in no more than 20 second. The following code send the text ok over the socket but delay sometimes 35 second receiving the response.
It seems that not check the socket all the time and the response arrived too late.
How can I read more quick from the socket?

Here the code

try
{
socket = new Socket(hostname,port);
System.out.println("Connected!!");

String request = "Hola";

InputStream in = socket.getInputStream ();
OutputStream out = socket.getOutputStream();

writeToSocket(socket,request, out);

StringBuffer response = new StringBuffer();

byte[] b = new byte[4096];

for (int n; (n = in.read(b)) != -1

{
response.append(new String(b, 0, n));
}

System.out.println("RESPONSE: "+response.toString());

in.close();
out.close();
socket.close();

}
catch (IOException e)
{

e.printStackTrace();
}

Some body can give me and idea

Thanks a lot!
Natalia

Your read will block until some bytes become available over the socket. There might be delays caused by the network or the sending partner being slow.

I had a nasty setup like this at work where the partner gets into a state that NEVER responds, so my read could hang forever. I moved the socket communication onto its own thread so the main thread could give up after a while and go on with life.

Any of that sound like your situation?

Yes it is true, the code can be waiting forever. How did you do de main tread to consider a time out? and where did you set the time out?

Naty

I posted a bit of the logic in this thread on threads. See if that would work for you. That doesn't kill the blocked thread - it goes on blocking and eventually finishes but I don't wait for it.