sockets

Hi! I'm trying to speed up a big application by splitting it into a codebase acting as a server and the actual scripts communicating with the server using sockets. I got the server working, at least it works when I send a request via telnet. When I try to let a script act as the client I get no response. I think the problem is the length parameter in the read()-function. Not all requests and results are 2048 bytes, but I have no idea what to use as a delimiter instead. Here are the scripts so far: Server: // Socket was created, bind & listen executed do { if (($msgsock = accept_connect($sock)) < 0) { // wait for request echo "accept_connect() failed: reason: " . strerror ($msgsock) . "\n"; break; } do { $buf = ''; $ret = read ($msgsock, $buf, 2048); // read request echo "request: $ret <br>"; if ($ret < 0) { echo "read() failed: reason: " . strerror ($ret) . "\n"; break 2; } if ($ret == 0) { break 2; } $buf = trim ($buf); $talkback = eval($buf); // request verabeiten write ($msgsock, $talkback, strlen ($talkback)); // write result to socket echo "$buf\n"; } while (true); close ($msgsock); } while (true); Client: // Socket was created; submitting request write ($socket, $in, strlen ($in)); while (read ($socket, $out, 2048)) // reading response. what if the response is < 2048 bytes? { echo $out; } As I said: The server works perfectly using telnet, but the script-client does not give any output, allthough the connection was created successfully. Thanks in advance for any answers. I hope I was able to describe the problem well enough. Matt