Critical Description
So it turns out that using the channel in SyncProducer like we are to perform blocking reads will not trigger socket timeouts (though we set it) and will block forever which is bad. This bug identifies the issue: http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4614802 and this article presents a potential work-around: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2866557/timeout-for-socketchannel for workaround. The work-around is a simple solution that involves creating a separate ReadableByteChannel instance for timeout-enabled reads.
