Consuming a HTTP Stream in C# Without Reading One Byte at a Time

[Bakuda]

I have been trying to read data from the Twitter stream API using C#, and since sometimes the API will return no data, and I am looking for a near-realtime response, I have been hesitant to use a buffer length of more than 1 byte on the reader in case the stream doesn't return any more data for the next day or two.I have been using the following line:\[code\]input.BeginRead(buffer, 0, buffer.Length, InputReadComplete, null); //buffer = new byte[1]\[/code\]Now that I plan to scale the application up, I think a size of 1 will result in a lot of CPU usage, and want to increase that number, but I still don't want the stream to just block. Is it possible to get the stream to return if no more bytes are read in the next 5 seconds or something similar?