How are you doing Marco? I'm looking at usocket-0.8.4. It may be worth exploring some of these aspects I see in its code: 1. option.lisp allows: (setf (socket-option mysocket :receive-timeout) ...) 2. usocket.lisp defines a generic socket-receive. It's only implemented for UDP sockets but I don't see why it shouldn't be implementable for stream-sockets too. Otherwise I don't see a better solution in usocket than inefficiently checking for and reading a byte at a time, like this. (defun read-available-vector (vector socket &key (start 0) (end nil)) "Reads whatever is presently available in SOCKET without hanging. SOCKET and VECTOR are assumed to have elts of type (unsigned-byte 8). Returns first unwritten position in VECTOR and whether at end-of-file." (when (null end) (setq end (length vector))) (assert (<= 0 start end (length vector))) (flet ((socket-readyp () (wait-for-input socket :timeout 0 :ready-only t))) (do ((i start (1+ i))) ((or (>= i end) (not (socket-readyp))) (values i nil)) (let ((b (read-byte (socket-stream stream) nil nil))) (unless b (return (values i t))) (setf (aref vector i) b))))) -- Vibhu