New to Java

Hello
Here's the situation. We want to make sure that the server that we connect to is ready to receive data. In conjunction with creating a new socket, we call the socket.isConnected() function. If the return value is false, we display an error to the user. As a test we entered an incorrect IP address for the server we needed to connect to. It took 4 minutes for the error message to display. My question is has anyone else experienced the socket.isConnected() function take minutes to return a false value if the socket is not connected?

Thanks
Any help would be greatly appreciated