This is a haskell + networking question... I have a multi threaded haskell server, which accepts client connections, processes their requests, and returns results. It currently works as desired, except where a client drops a connection whilst the server is processing a request. In this circumstance, the server currently doesn't notice that the client has gone until it finishes the processing and attempt to read the next request. I'd like to change it so that the request is aborted as soon as the client disconnects. One way of doing this would would be to maintain a separate thread that is always reading from the client, and buffers until the main thread needs the information. Whilst this would detect the remote close, it also would potentially consume large amounts of memory to maintain this buffer. Hence I seem to need a means of detecting that a socket has been closed remotely, without actually reading from it. . Does anyone know how to do this? One reference I've found is this: http://stefan.buettcher.org/cs/conn_closed.html Apparently recv() with appropriate flags can detect this - though I'm not convinced that the code as shown on that page doesn't busy wait when there is unread data from the client. Any tips or pointers? Perhaps what I'm trying to do is not currently possible in haskell, without using the FFI (which would be ok). Or perhaps it's not possible in linux at all. Thanks, Tim