It sounds to me as if it would work, but I personally am not a big fan of threads. If I were writing this, I'd be tempted to do a lot of plumbing. Each 'connector' would be a child with a pipe running back to the queue maintainer that uses IO::Select to keep track of them all. This would probably be a good job for POE, but I don't know enough about that module to say so with any authority or detail.