I have an application which connects to a machine which has 50-60 ports open on it to receive data (each for a different region). It acts like a switch. Problem is that when I make all those connection requests at the same time the server falls over trying to handle all the connections requests from my application. I cannot control or change the behaviour of the server I am connecting to, however, I am also unable to find a way to easily to add a delay between connection requests in twisted (without blocking the reactor), so that only 2 or 3 start up at a time. Is there an elegant and clean way to do such a thing? Twisted has worked beautifully for everything else, but I can't replace this one server for a while until I can duplicate the rest of its functionality, so I am dependant on it providing the data.