For the past few weeks, I’ve been struggling with getting the solution to work consistently on a saturated link. The failure rate was pretty low, on the order of 1-3%. Our application can’t tolerate any failures, so it is important that we get to the bottom of it. And the failures were not graceful– the application would hang in an apparent deadlock with the receiving side blocking on a read(). I tried experimenting with several different ideas (timeout on sysread/syswrite, non-blocking io, simplified multiplexing), but I wasn’t able to get to source of the problem.