I was looking into APE and they have a socket library that creates a socket server. Is there a tutorial on how to go about creating this so that the socket server is always running? and how well does it scale?
Mmmm, not sure what are you looking for. The socket server looks pretty straightforward!
http://www.ape-project.org/docs/server/sockets/sockserver.html
About the scaling, I don't know, but they claim it scales (vertically) to more than 100,000 concurrent clients.