This?

elsif( @ips ? $sel->count >= $max : $sel->count )
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What you call educative I call overly clever and in this case outright obstructive. This is the equivalent when you get rid of the ternary

elsif( ( @ips && $sel->count >= $max ) || $sel->count )
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Which is clearer and not even longer. And once you see it like this and realize @ips is not used in within the following block, it becomes apparent you can safely omit that and the conditional becomes

elsif( $sel->count )
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One should keep conditionals as simple as possible. Similarly is this

my @connects;
for my $fh ( @connects = $sel->can_write($timeout) )
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suboptimal. Apart from, again, obstructing the conditional, one should keep declaration and initialization as close to one another as possible.

my @connects = $sel->can_write($timeout);
for my $fh ( @connects )
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This is better.