[Catalyst] [OT] Event-driven middleware?

[Brian Kirkbride]

Hello Catalyst-world,

We have a Catalyst app that is fronted by Lighttpd and we're looking 
to switch to NginX instead.  Problem is that we have a number of 
policy based rules that are executed on a per-request basis.  These 
are currently implemented as mod_magnet scripts.

Ideally we'd like to remove these from the frontend webserver 
configuration entirely and move them closer to the application. 
Problem is that we can't have Catalyst run the checks for each request 
(including those for static resources), there are WAY too many 
concurrent requests.

What we really need is an event-driven piece of middleware that can 
intercept each request and decide whether to return an X-Sendfile to 
the frontend or transparently pass the original request through to 
Catalyst.

Perlbal is an obvious choice but seems like overkill for our needs. 
We have no need for a full HTTP proxy and I'd like to preserve the 
speed/flexibility we have with UNIX domain sockets and FastCGI.  Maybe 
something based on PoCo::Proxy::TCP is a better option?

I'd appreciate any musings other Catalyst users might have...

Best,
Brian