Probably the worst thing about using blocking sockets is what happens
when the other side comes down hard (without doing a
close
). Your socket is likely to hang. SOCKSTREAM is a
reliable protocol, and it will wait a long, long time before giving up
on a connection. If you're using threads, the entire thread is
essentially dead. There's not much you can do about it. As long as you
aren't doing something dumb, like holding a lock while doing a
blocking read, the thread isn't really consuming much in the way of
resources. Do not try to kill the thread - part of the reason
that threads are more efficient than processes is that they avoid the
overhead associated with the automatic recycling of resources. In
other words, if you do manage to kill the thread, your whole process
is likely to be screwed up.