[RickHull]

With (dirt simple) length-prefix framing, and blocking reads, pauses and such are non-issues. e.g. blocking read for 2 length bytes, blocking read for N bytes of payload. If your read fails for any reason, or you've timed out, then you give up and close the connection.

Your application protocol needs to handle timeouts (some sort of retry, preferably with some notion of idempotency).

The problem with:

> > Length-prefixed message framing winds up being 10-100 lines of code in almost any language/environment.

is that it's not really a response the ZMQ feature. With ZMQ you don't have to reimplement for every application and platform.