If you're sitting in the debugger for N seconds, there's a good chance the other side of the connection is going to give up based on in-band protocol anyway. If you want this to work, you really need a separate process local proxy that satisfies the liveness criteria of the other side, but lets you single step through your side. Of course, debugging the local proxy is an exercise left to the reader; you may need to study at the printf school of debugging.