I wrote a web chat in Perl using techniques from Network Programming with Perl ISBN 0201615711. The chat daemon/server gets an extremely light load but it's up and running for six months at a stretch without trouble. Never had to restart it except when my host reboots the server. The book is really good. John Orwant jacket quote: ...a superb book...a must-have for the serious Perl programmer.
Stein explains why some of the common idioms for things like CHLD/zombie reaping are flawed and can add up to problems over long periods. That might be why Perl has obtained a dicey rep(?). This also seems the right time to mention that I've had trouble with Proc::Daemon (not memory, but that it won't even start a daemon on OS X). Stein's techniques worked transparently for me on a couple *nixes. I started sketching out a CPAN module (or Proc::Daemon update) with some of Stein's code but I never got it working the way I wanted as a standalone or writing to syslogs well enough to publicize.