Thanks in large part to Chipmunk's efforts, I was able to figure out a few optimizations to make this work without resorting to the 'full-blown forking process handler' approach. Perhaps this is oversimplified and I missed something important; if that's the case, please please let me know before I put this code into production.

After correcting the logic to use the child status ($?) to increment/not increment the counter for status, I fixed the forking so that the parent wouldn't wait for each child, to improve speed. To prevent the resulting fork()bomb, I devised a clever (to me) way to subdivide the array @targets into chunks that I could use to get exactly as many clients as I needed, but no more. I then used a global variable ($i) to index the array so that each child got called on a separate target, and no target got checked more than once.

If anyone has any further optimizations, please share!

$maxprocs = 50;

my $prox = int(scalar(@targets)/$maxprocs);
my $prox_r = int(scalar(@targets)%$maxprocs);
my $i = 0;

if ($prox)    # call the forking routine as many times as required to 
+get most of the targets
 {
  for ( 1 .. $prox ) 
   {
    &breed($maxprocs);  
   }
 }
if ($prox_r)  # Then call the forking routine but this time only enoug
+h to catch the modulo
 {
  &breed($prox_r);
 }

# Calculate results and print to STDOUT
my $success = ( $main::avail / scalar(@targets) ) * 100;    # return r
+esults as a percentage
$success = sprintf('%.2f',$success);                        # rounded 
+to 2 decimals 
print "$success\n";


#########################
sub breed ($)
#########################
{
    my $loop = shift;
    for ( 1 .. $loop )      #make a bunch of kids
     {
       if ($pid=fork) {
           push @pids, $pid;
           $i ++; 
       } elsif (defined $pid) {
           my $next = @targets[${i}];
           &check_status($next);
           exit;
       }
     }
   foreach my $childpid (@pids)   # wait for all kids to return before
+ continuing
   {
    waitpid($childpid, 0);
    $main::avail += ! $?;   # Increment the master counter, 0 means su
+ccess, non-zero means failure
   }
}
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