in reply to Pre-fork and Re-use a child process
Some ideas
The article mentions a non-preforking but nicer example http://search.cpan.org/dist/Parallel-ForkManager/lib/Parallel/ForkManager.pm#Data_structure_retrieval
forks version of threads offers an opportunity for a reusable pool of threads
you can also use threads version of threads to create a cue( not a Thread::Pool but yes a Thread::Queue )
Parallel::Fork::BossWorkerAsync looks tointerface be exactly what you're looking for, pre-forking re-use, main program talks to boss, boss keeps reusing children, talking to main
Those are three things I might try
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