[Catalyst] Performance with persistent connetions

[Michael Giambalvo]

I'd like to make an application where the client keeps a connection
open to the server as a channel to receive events.  Here are some
examples of what I'm shooting for

http://ajaxpatterns.org/HTTP_Streaming
http://www.lightstreamer.com/

What I'm wondering is what would be the ideal catalyst setup for this,
and what kind of capacity should I expect?   Essentially, what I want
is for certain controller methods to keep running for long periods of
time, perhaps blocking or sleeping, and to send events back to the
client as they occur.

How many concurrent sessions should I be able to keep open if I'm
running catalyst in lighthttpd with fastCGI, for example?  I've
considered making my own server to handle this one specific case, but
I'd much rather do this within catalyst.