note technojosh Testing server response time is not something you should put much time in hand-rolling yourself. There are a number of utilities that do this, not all in perl. I've had decent success with <a href="http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/">Apache JMeter</a>, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't research other tools. <p> I'm not here to plug <a href="http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/">jmeter</a>, but it's worked great for me in monitoring response time under load. <p> I'd be very curious if other monks have successfully handled this type of issue purely with perl, since I've always wanted to but never *needed* to <i>(due to the presence of existing utilities.)</i> 836524 836524