speeding up interaction during a big loop

[Doug Lerner]

If I am just waiting for a socket read, interaction is fine as long as I use
the "with message" form of the read. When there is no socket data coming in
all the other events like text input, etc., work just fine.

But if I am doing something like a 1MB file transfer over a socket, even if
I break up the file into small chunks and send it in a loop with read/write
checks in the loop the handling of other events slows down to a crawl.

Is there some standard way of dealing with this - like inserting something
into the loop to intentionally "stop and listen for other messages" or
something like that?

Thanks,

doug