How to manage socket communications

Question

i need to learn about how to manage socket communications. does any one has sample codes to share that illustrates how to manage sockets? Im going to create an application that listens over a socket. My socket listener should be able to read over the socket continuously without user intervention. If there's no data, it would wait until something comes in. If some data come in, the listener should be able to read it automatically, and save data in db.
Im thinking of an infinite loop here, but the problem
arises when the socket is waiting for data to come in. The application consumes 100% CPU resources. And im only running one instance of my socket listener. My solution here is to use threads and let the thread SLEEP for a while when no there's no data yet.
Any advise on this matter is very much appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

It sounds, that you are using non-blocking read from a socket inside a busy wait loop. You should do a blocking read, which means your process/thread will be suspended by OS untill something is available on your socket.
I'm new to Java and I can not say how actually to implement this, but look for "blocking/non-blocking read" in network interface documentation.
Zhenya.