lestrrat : I think this seems like a good solution. Would the message queue be a pipe? If so, can I make sure that the child transport isn't blocked waiting for the parent to read from the pipe? I am a bit unsure about the mechanics of the pipe mechanism.

zengargoyle et al: I will check out Event. I know of IO::Select - one worry is that I seem to lose the simplicity of HTTP::Daemon and have to get more tangled up in low level stuff. I guess I would just make the Select object persist and then read from it at regular intervals... that could be cool.

Thanks for your tips.

dave hj~