beejs

The (only) way to stop listening is to close the listening socket. That will have no effect on the already accepted connection(s), so they can continue to be used. To start listening again, you will need to open a new listening socket and bind it. You'll probably need the SO_REUSEADDR option on the socket if you want to reopen the port before the TCP delay period has elapsed.

You could instead keep the listening socket around and simply not accept any more connections until you are finished with the first one, but that would not actually not listen -- any additional client that tried to connect would get a handshake from the kernel (so it would think it was connected) rather than a rejection.

A third possibility which is even more unlke what you are asking, but it probably a better design would be to keep the socket open and accept additional connections while you are processing the first connection, but then close these new connections right away with some kind of BUSY message. Then clients could know at least something about what is going on.

It all depends on what you want to have clients see when they try to connect to a busy server.

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