thanks for the reply but not sure it helps. The connection in my sample app is a "long-running" connection (intended to handle multiple requests for any given client) so in general isComplete is never true (until I send an "end" request) and the isFinal is sure on every receive. If I run the netcat (nc) tool from a terminal window to my server, it seems to know when the data is complete for a given request; it echoes back all the data for that request and then accepts next input line