Hmm, the reason why I am trying to stream the data is that because in the past with an earlier version of my program, I was getting strange errors when processing large amounts of data on the socket. I would list a newsgroup, and recieve the list of titles of the (in the form of the post number) from the newsserver. However, this only worked up until a certain number of posts. When listing large newsgroups, such as alt.binaries.boneless, after a while I would start getting an error. I can't remember what exactly, something along the lines of maxLen() > 2 ... I was processing the readLine() of the socket, adding the information directly into a QListWidget.