Result!

Well, my guess turned out to be correct, and the temporary version of the Polly server with no log files is responding instantly to all button presses and commands.  All I need to do now is create some kind of non-blocking log system.  That sounds like an awful lot of coding, but wait, someone's already been there:  Unix's syslog system already has the capability to log to a remote system and would appear to do all I need.  So all that remains is to find out how to drive it...