TCP sockets are streams, not messages, so berkeley sockets send() function on some systems may send less data than required. Since Ruby Socket is very thin wrapper over berkeley sockets, AFAIK Socket#send will behave exactly like berkeley sockets send(). So what is the correct way to send a complete message via Ruby TCP sockets? In python it's a special function for that called sendall(). But in Ruby i need to manually write code like that: while (sent = sock.send( data, 0 ) < data.length do data = data[ sent..-1 ] end