BTW: The simple cure for the problem would be to switch sleep for select( '','','', $timeout ), which would allow the timeout to be specified in fractional seconds; and set the default to something like 0.01. (Without adding a dependency upon Time::HiRes )

"...to switch sleep for select( '','','', $timeout )..."

Unfortunately i must admit that i don't understand this.

Best regards, Karl

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i don't understand this.

See the "Blocking calls" section of the P::FM docs.

By default; the parent process polls to see if one fo the existing kids has completed; and sleeps between polls. And by default, sleeps's smallest granularity is 1 second. Thus, it does not notice when a child process has finished for upto 1 second after it has.

For processes as in (my version of) your example where the processing takes 0.142s to complete; that means each process that gets waited for takes 85% longer in elapsed time before its replacement gets started.

If the module used the 4-arg select instead of sleep to control it polling loop; it would be able to used a much smaller timeout, and notice when child processes finished in a more timely manner.

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