What you've shown isn't really the kind of event loop I meant (see e.g. POE) - but that might not be necessary in this case. My understanding from the somewhat sparse documentation (the module is apparently still in beta) and a look at some of the code is that it will return undef if there is currently no message available. Without having the time to test myself at the moment, it sounds to me like this is the "idle" event you are looking for. I don't think you need nested loops either, a single loop with an if/elsif after get_next_message should be enough. Note there is also Time::HiRes that you can use to keep precise track of the timings if you like. And be careful with sleeps, depending on the message frequency, you may not need them at all and you might unnecessarily block your code. And a final nitpick: you seem to be using the term "frame" when you mean "message", I recommend sorting that out so there is no confusion when reading the code.