What are socket options, and why should I use them?
Socket options give developers greater control over how sockets behave. Most socket behavior is controlled by the operating system, not Java itself, but as of JDK1.1, you can control several socket options, including SO_TIMEOUT, SO_LINGER, TCP_NODELAY, SO_RCVBUF and SO_SNDBUF. These are advanced options, and many programmers may want to ignore them. That’s OK, but be aware of their existence for the future. You might like to specify a timeout for read operations, to control the amount of time a connection will linger for before a reset is sent, whether Nagle’s algorithm is enabled/disabled, or the send and receive buffers for datagram sockets.
