I would say that at minimum you should be checking the return value of your call to $client_socket->send(). If it fails, you should get undef, and if it succeeds you'll know how many bytes were written. My bet is that it's failing. If that's the case, try to also inspect what happens when you call $client_socket->new(). That might be informative.

This isn't much different from the types of checks you would do when you open a filehandle. Just as we grow accustomed to checking the success of an 'open' call, we should be checking success of socket interactions.