Thank you. I found this thread very helpful and informative. Unfortunately the book you've noted is a bit out of my price range and my Christmas gifts have already been bought.

I've eliminated the "open, read, write, close" model because the overhead is too high. I want the server to be able to handle a load of a few hundred concurrent users, even if it doesn't ever scale that high in actuality.

Given the problems with fork() in Windows I've eliminated it as well as I don't currently have a Unix machine to test on. This may change in future.

This leaves me with threads and select(). I am still weighing the benefits and drawbacks but I'm leaning towards select() switching. I've taken your advice and the model I've drawn up for the server has the networking core abstracted with an API so I can switch the underlying implementation as it becomes prudent to do so.

Is there a specific reason you've never written network servers in Perl? (i.e. am I missing something important?)

Thank you once again for sharing your perspective.