You could open a socket yourself, but that's a solved problem with libwwwperl. (See LWP.) If you're fine downloading them within the server process, you're done. Otherwise, you could set up a daemon that listens for a message of some kind and downloads them itself. You could use a directory, a file, or even a database table for this. You might also look at the chunk feature of LWP::UserAgent, if you're using a persistent process and don't want to eat up 200 megabytes of memory.