Hello Joel, Wednesday, December 14, 2005, 7:55:36 PM, you wrote: JR> In my current architecture I launch a two threads per socket where JR> the socket reader places results in a TMVar and the socket writer JR> takes input from a TChan. as i already said, you can write to socket directly in your worker thread JR> I also have the worker thread the does the JR> bulk of packet processing and a timer thread. The time thread sleeps JR> for a few minutes and exits after posting a timeout event if it JR> hasn't been killed before. you can use just one timeouts thread for all your bots. if this timeout is constant across program run, then this thread will be very simple - just: 1) read from Chan (yes, it is the case where using of Chan wll be appropriate! ;) 2) wait until 9 or so minutes from the time when this message was sent 3) send kill signal to the thread mentioned in message so, you will had only 2 threads. you can then try to play with conbinating socket reading and TMVar reading in one thread (btw, try to replace TMVar with MVar - may be, it will be better?). or, you can try to create one sockets reading thread, which will service all sockets. may be, this can be somewhat done with help of select() system call? it is a more "right way", but i don't know how this can be accomplished -- Best regards, Bulat mailto:bulatz@HotPOP.com