Firstly, the socket stream you have opened is most likely in blocked mode, which means your server trying to access the socket is blocked until there is data coming in from the socket.

Secondly, you are reading the socket incorrectly. If should be

while (read($client,$buffer,1024) == 1024) {
   # loop only if the incoming data is more than 1k
   $read .= $buffer;
}
# at this point, the buffer contains data less than 1k
# this is the last read done by the while loop.
$read .= $buffer;
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