[development] How to control background processes from inside Drupal?

[Leo Burd]

Hello there,

Is there any way to start/stop background processes from inside Drupal?

I'm currently writing a module that has to continuously monitor  a 
socket connection for events coming from a remote server.  I thought 
about using hook_cron(), but I'm afraid that the infinite (or 
continuous) loop of my event handler would tie out other modules that 
use hook_cron().  Another alternative would be to use batch api, but do 
batch processes run in the background?

Thanks in advance,

Leo