Not only does it sound doable, it sounds pretty straight forward.

I'm pretty sure it is pretty straight forward. My only concern is taking up too much resources. The current script (using max if 5 fork()'d children) already takes ~4-5 hours to run... Albeit some things aren't at it's most efficient, I just don't want it to take longer.

From what I'm seeing with Perl threads is that it's really CPU/Memory intensive vs general fork(). That's a lot to ask for just for the ability to share data, my primary concern. Not to mention Perl's history of being flakey with Threads (although a post below has stated it's stablalized now).

In the future I might see about writing this in Java, but at this time it's just not feasiable due to current data imports (standard Dumper dump of variables into a file). But that's not for at least 6+ months, until I can get XML inputs and data use stablized.

If you want to chat more about specs, feel free to email me gp-at-gpcentre.net. I don't really want to clutter this post up with "my problem" per say. More use it to discusse perl threading in general.