It's a max of 5 children at once. I tried to use a pool, but couldn't figure out a way to make sure none of the children used a wrong handle. Care to share how you got past this one? I tried an array with $cnt++ % 5, but no way to guarentee each child will finish in order.

Each child starts off opening a connection and then calls a close method which closes the connection. All that works and in order. The code is very verbose and I see that part just fine.