Thanks for the suggestion. Have not used POE before (but have read a bit about it in Simon Cozens book "Advanced Perl Programming") so will pass it for now, in favour of a simple Dancer function that hands out sockets to requestors. This function keeps track of which socket belongs to which requestor using a hash whose keys are session ids. If the session id is a key in the hash it just hands out the corresponding socket, if not it creates a new one, records it in the hash and hands it out. Since I run the Dancer app under Starman, I believe the handed sockets would be persistent.

Would POE give me a more robust solution than this obviously simplistic method? If yes, I would love to give it a go.