Overall, good stuff. But I think you better doublecheck that "Perl will read a few bytes ahead to improve performance" claim. I don't recall coming across that anywhere else before. In particular, I've used print and <> with sockets before with no problems. The key is to not mix them with sysread and syswrite.

Also, I think IO::Socket and IO::Select deserve more space. After becoming comfortable with them, I far prefer them over the raw Perl stuff, which looks more like C than Perl. There's a good example of both IO::Socket and IO::Select at the end of perldoc IO::Select. Of course, it should be noted that the major limitation of IO::Select is that it doesn't allow you to wait for reading, writing, and exceptions simultaneously. You have to pick one. But, for the example you show, that's not a limitation.

Finally, one minor thing: "get all the data it wants before continue" should be "...continuing".

But, overall, pretty good stuff. Have a Scooby snack on me.

*Woof*

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