Socket Flush Bug in Windows (JRE1.4.2)

Question

It may be a bug or a OS (windows) specific issue.
The problem is:
You have a socket and an OutputStream (DataOutputStream or
BufferedOutputStream).
If you do two write/flush in a loop, the second write
one will be stuck in the underlying socket buffer.
And, no matter what you do, you cannot flush it. I tried everything,
even getFD().sync(), but it did not work. (SyncFailedException)
Then when you do another write/flush (the third one) the second one
finally goes to the server. But now you have the third one stuck !!!
I just found out that if you put a Thread.sleep(100) in between the
write/flush, it works !!!! But that's scary.
Another possible workaround is to avoid multiple writes, in other
words, never do a write in a loop. If you need to send three byte
arrays, put them all in a single byte array and send the whole thing
at once, in a single write. Or use a BufferedOutputStream for that matter.

Answer 1

Thank you for your reply !!!
For my surprise, the problem is not with the flush !!!! I am 99% sure this is a bug. Some other people told me it does not happen with Linux.
Look what I did:
BufferedOutputStream bos = new BufferedOutputStream(socket.getOutputStream());
for(int i=0;i<2;i++) bos.write(bytearray); // buffering here !!!!
bos.flush(); // send the whole thing at once !!!!
Guess what happened ? IT DID NOT WORK AGAIN !!!!
The second bytearray got stuck in the socket buffer.
Now if you do this:
for(int i=0;i<2;i++) {
bos.write(bytearray); // buffering here !!!!
Thread.yield();
bos.flush(); // send the whole thing at once !!!!
It works !!! This is very strange.
EJP, I agree with you, but the situation I am describing should never happen. I must be able to tell the socket to send its contents NOW. It cannot hold its bytes forever, until something else comes along in the stream. Agree ?
Whenever I have time I will write a test case to isolate the problem.
Sergio