slow reading from socket

Hi I am building (or attemting to build) an msn messenger class. I am having problems reading from the socket. I open a connection with fsockopen(), i then write commands to the socket with fputs(). I am reading wth fgets(). It is all fine if I am reading one line returned by the server, the script runs quickly. However is i wish to read multiple lines the script basically stops. I am working with code like this to read multiple lines... <?php function read() { $fp =& $this->fp; $this->response = ''; while($line = fgets($fp, 1024)) { $this->response .= $line; } return $this->response; } ?> I think it may be geting into an infinite loop. With nntp protocol you can test for a fullstop and then stop reading, does anyone know if there is somthing like this in msn messenger protocol? has anyone else had this problem. I rewrote the class using the socket functions such as socket_create(), socket_connect() and socket_read() but had the same problems. Is it a problem with my code or is it somthing to do with the way the server is working? help me! Thanks, Mike -- MGS2 Online http://www.mgs2online.f2s.com