Except in a single-threaded environment like mIRC scripting, anything lasting more than 1-2 seconds is going to cause issues. In hixxy's example he uses a timeout of 100 seconds, can you imagine if there was no response on the socket and mIRC was actually frozen for that long? Of course it's only an example figure he's using but with the short timeouts necessary to prevent this becoming a major issue it would severely impact the usefulness of these identifiers due a high number of timeouts.
