... or were you simply to busy bullshitting about how you'd seen and done it all in pre-school, to take any notice.

So, all kinds of Danger, Will Robinson! alarm bells are going off in my head.

Geez! You're like a kid that was told masturbation would make him go blind and has refused wash his winkle ever since.

A simple example of threading at work:

Fetching 100 urls serially:

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use LWP::Simple;

my $start = time;
while( <> ) {
    chomp;
    eval {
        local $SIG{ ALRM } = sub { die 'timeout' };
        alarm 10;

        my($content_type, $document_length, $modified_time, $expires, 
+$server) =
            head( "http://$_" ) or warn "Failed to HEAD $_: $!\n";
    };
}

printf "\nRunning HEAD on $. urls serially took %d seconds\n",
    time() - $start;

__END__
C:\test>junk57 urls.list.small
Failed to HEAD www.asuscom.de: Bad file descriptor
Failed to HEAD www.belkin.com: Bad file descriptor
Failed to HEAD www.logical-approach.com: Bad file descriptor

Running HEAD on 100 urls serially took 102 seconds
[download]

Fetching those same urls in parallel:

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use threads;
use LWP::Simple;

my $start = time;
my @threads;
while( <> ) {
    chomp;
    push @threads, async{
        eval {
            local $SIG{ ALRM } = sub { die 'timeout' };
            alarm 10;

            my( $content_type, $document_length, $modified_time, $expi
+res, $server ) =
                head( "http://$_" ) or warn "Failed to HEAD $_: $!\n";
        };
    };
}

$_->join for @threads;

printf "\nRunning HEAD on $. urls using threading took %d seconds\n",
    time() - $start;

__END__
C:\test>junk58 urls.list.small
Failed to HEAD www.asuscom.de:
Failed to HEAD www.belkin.com:
Failed to HEAD www.logical-approach.com:

Running HEAD on 100 urls using threading took 19 seconds
[download]

5 times faster -- and look at how much more complicated it is. Four whole extra lines!