Many thanks to you, Monks!

After much fiddling with the ideas here, I decided on another way of doing it. Here's what I decided:

I'm using IO::Socket::INET, so my ports are defaulted to non-blocking. Sadly, that means that as soon as I get any connection from the client, I can get an undef on that port during a pause or after input during the next cycle. So that was out.

I then set the port to block, and set the Timeout value, but it wouldn't time out for me at accept. Dunno why that is, I'm on *nix, so it should work. *shrug*

So, I set the thing to block, and after the accept I added:

$test=$data_port->peerhost();
if (not defined $test){close_data_port;}
[download]

That way, during any client pause, the connection is still open, so peerhost returns it's IP address. When the connection drops, that value goes undef and I call my exit sub.

Now, my population explosion is under control. Many Thanks!

Declarent