connection monitoring

[John Michael]

Let me start by saying, I am a self taught programmer and have written modperl scripts to run under apache registry and dabbled with writting my own modperl modules.   I want to write a modperl script to monitor connections each remote_ip is making to a certain folder.  I want to be able to limit people from downloading more than some number of files at one time.   My idea is to keep track of how many connections I have from each ip in a mysql database or maybe in some sort of  memory cache.   In trying to figure out how to do it, I know that sometimes people will terminate their connection from their browser before the modperl connection handler is able to unlog the connection.  Therefore, I could expire old connections, which I will probably have to do anyway to clean up old connections that are left over.  But, is there anyway to tell if the user has terminated the download and do a cleanup.   i guess if you write it in modperl, you could cleanup in the log phase.    IF I write the script in regular perl whcih I am better at and run it under apahe registry, how would I know the connection was terminated.   Any ideas on the subject would be greatly appreceiated. Thanks John Michael