What you can try - reduce amount of threads running at the same time - thus accept less connections. AFAIK the OS has a buffer caching the connection request for a while - thus this may just work. Using STM it would be trivial to implement it: try incrementing a var, if it is > 100 fail. It will only be retried if the vars change or such, correct? When you're done decrease the number. - increase limit (you said this is no option) - replace getContents conn by something strict and close the handle yourself? (not sure about this.) Eg yesod introduces conduits for that reason => http://www.yesodweb.com/blog/2011/12/conduits There are alternative implementations on hackage. - not sure how many apps are running at the same time. But instead of creating many connections from machine A to B you could try establishing a permanent connection sending binary streams or "chunk" the messages. Eg wait for 5 requests - then bundle them and send them all at once (depneds on your implementation whether this could be an option). That's all which comes to my mind. Probably more experienced users have additional ideas. Thus keep waiting and reading. Marc Weber