As I understand it, timeout would apply to the connection handshake, not waiting for a poll or data message. Also, I checked the source for IO::Socket::INET, and the timeout function is commented out. You could still try adding a timeout to the constructor, but I don't know if that would work or not. I'd go with jethro's advice and use IO::Socket::INET::Daemon. It's the simplest way that I know of.