As part of my mod_perl HTTP request handler, I need to send (simultaneous) socket requests to backend servers (and then aggregate the results from backend into actual HTTP responses). And to make sure my handler don't block, I would need to set a timeout of those backend socket requestes around 20ms or so.

So far, I am using Thread::Queue and threads packages to hook the pre-allocated worker threads with the main thread. However, I am a bit confused how to do the following in worker threads:

• create a socket handler, preferably reusable across multiple HTTP requests;
• Send a request through the socket and receive response within 20ms;
• If network is slow, timeout without exiting, neither affects other threads;

I read about APR::Socket APIs (http://perl.apache.org/docs/2.0/api/APR/Socket.html) but am confused about how to create a $sock object from host name and port number.

Could you monks help with a sample code snippet? Or any other packages/ways to do the same? Thanks!