I'm 99% sure opensourcer is doing something prosaic so this post is 99% sure to be irrelevant to him or her. I just wanted to respond to you to say that you can use mod_perl as a socket server. Override the Connection handler and you're free to leave http behind and go be something else entirely different. We've got an RPC sort of thing going instead. Apache+mod_perl is just a convenient server to hang our framework off of.