modperl and comet?

I'm interested in adding a Comet capability to a (rather large)
mod-perl application.

To get around XSS limitations, the Comet service will have the same
host and port as the web service. However, I don't want a large
mod-perl process tied up performing the Comet service.

Is there a way that a web request can be passed off to another process
without tying up the Apache process? For instance, can the Apache
process pass the file descriptors for the HTTP connection to another
process which would free itself up for handling the next Apache
request?

Is there another way to implement this?

Thanks,
ER