Ok. Now that we have the deserved "smell the roses because it's reality" comment out of the way, are there any out-of-the-box ideas? I can think of switching to TCP messaging for one (each thread listens on its own port - slow but an option). Is there anything faster?
Comment on Re^2: Desperately need help with threaded socket
Hhmmm... Has anyone tried to do something like this using ZeroMQ?
The ZeroMQ Request-Reply Broker pattern seems like it would fit my problem's requirement, particularly if I added a Queue Proxy. Each parent thread could be a client (I have control over the API the parent threads use to talk to the broker).