Here's the problem. You're stating that Perl's time function doesn't work in a loop. If that's true you should be able to post a small test program that illustrates this. For example, the following program does not use threads or sockets but relies on time() to terminate after 30 seconds:

#!perl

use strict;
use warnings;

my $endtime = time + 30;
while (1) {
    if (time > $endtime) {
    print "30 seconds have passed\n";
    exit;
    }
    sleep 1;
}
[download]

and lo and behold, it works.