do a search for AMI (Asterisk Manager Interface). It is a TCP based system which can stream events to you in real time. It also allows you to send commands to the system to take action on existing channels, execute CLI commands, or originate calls.
I believe that issue was resolved sometime in the 1.4 releases. I have never had any issues… and frankly for the type of thing he is talking about doing he would probably have a single connection open all the time to capture event state from asterisk.
g2010: I am using 1.4.23.1 and I still have issues with the AMI not responding to my commands (unrelated to another issue where Asterisk would just lock up after connecting one to many times).