The way to organize read timeout (read idle timeout) for socket connection with Netty. See. http://docs.jboss.org/netty/3.2/api/org/jboss/netty/handler/timeout/ReadTimeoutHandler.html

socket_idle_timeout.java

 public class MyPipelineFactory implements ChannelPipelineFactory {

     private final Timer timer;
     private final ChannelHandler timeoutHandler;

     public MyPipelineFactory(Timer timer) {
         this.timer = timer;
         this.timeoutHandler = new ReadTimeoutHandler(timer, 30), // timer must be shared.
     }

     public ChannelPipeline getPipeline() {
         // An example configuration that implements 30-second read timeout:
         return Channels.pipeline(
             timeoutHandler,
             new MyHandler());
     }
 }

 ServerBootstrap bootstrap = ...;
 Timer timer = new HashedWheelTimer();
 ...
 bootstrap.setPipelineFactory(new MyPipelineFactory(timer));
 ...