strange i/o delay problem in socket

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

In article <1152217245.097394.225510 at p79g2000cwp.googlegroups.com>,
 "liubojin at gmail.com" <liubojin at gmail.com> wrote:

>while in most cases, the time needed for a handler thread to read the
>request line from the socket is below 1 millisecond, there are some
>cases this time is over severl thousand (or even higher) milliseconds.
>I'm just wondering what could be the possible cause(s) of this ? btw,
>this happens more often when there are large number of clients, but
>will also happen ocassionally when the number of client is very
>small....

It could just be occasional packet loss over your physical network--i.e. 
something outside your control.

Not sure how you'd test this, except by running a packet sniffer.