Interesting analogy, 1nickt, but I don't want the overhead of leaving the socket in its regularly hit position (i.e. every webpage load), for the rest of my application's life, which could be decades.  I'd rather spend more time now getting it working (hopefully) slightly more efficiently.  This may or may not have been a bad call.  Who is one to judge, especially when one doesn't know the whole picture?
(And if I were doing the job without PerlMonks, with my limited experience, I wouldn't know what appropriate socket to use.)