Thank you for the replies. I was going to use the "toy" program to benchmark the idea. I had my doubts that using pipes within a single process could be faster than my read/write loop, but this is Perl and stranger things are known to be true.

I did learn more about POE. In a previous application I managed to get POE::Wheel::Run working without really understanding what was going on. I now have a better feel for how POE works and what is possible using it.

Thanks again!