Hi zentara,

Found this thread via your mention of it here. I'm providing a demonstration for Perl lacking threads support. Perl with threads support may run MCE::Shared as well. Simply replace MCE::Hobo with threads. I went completely OO with the shared objects for minimum overhead.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use MCE::Hobo;
use MCE::Shared;

my %shash;
my @to_be_processed = ('a'..'z');
my $ready = MCE::Shared->array;

my $numworkers = 10;

foreach my $dthread(1..$numworkers){
    $shash{$dthread}{'go'}     = MCE::Shared->scalar( 0);
    $shash{$dthread}{'fileno'} = MCE::Shared->scalar('');
        #in case you want shared filehandles

    $shash{$dthread}{'data'}   = MCE::Shared->scalar('');
    $shash{$dthread}{'pid'}    = MCE::Shared->scalar(-1);
    $shash{$dthread}{'die'}    = MCE::Shared->scalar( 0);

    $shash{$dthread}{'thread'} = MCE::Hobo->new(\&worker, $dthread);
    $ready->push($dthread);
}

print "\t\t",$ready->len," threads ready.......press a key to start th
+reads\n";

<>;

while (my $t = $ready->shift){
    $shash{$t}{'data'}->set(shift @to_be_processed);
    $shash{$t}{'go'}->set(1);
}

while(1){

    if( $ready->len > 0 ){
        if( my $data = shift @to_be_processed ){
            my $t = $ready->shift;
            $shash{$t}{'data'}->set($data);
            $shash{$t}{'go'}->set(1);
            print "thread $t restarting\n";
        }else{
            print "out of input\n"; goto WAIT;
        }
    }
}

WAIT:
print "\n\n\nWAITING FOR FINISH\n\n\n";

while(1){
    print "\n\n\n",$ready->len," are ready\n\n\n";
    if( $ready->len < $numworkers ){
        sleep 1;
    }else{
        foreach my $t ( $ready->vals ){
            $shash{$t}{'die'}->set(1);
            $shash{$t}{'thread'}->join;
            print "joining thread $t\n";
        }
        exit;
    }
}

sub worker{
    my $thr_num = shift;
    print "$thr_num started\n";

    #create your reusable objects here if needed

    my $count;

START:
    while(1){
        if( $shash{$thr_num}{'die'}->get() ){
            print "thread $thr_num finishing\n";
            return
        }

        #wait for $go_control
        if( $shash{$thr_num}{'go'}->get() ){

            if( $shash{$thr_num}{'die'}->get() ){
                print "thread finishing\n";
                return
            }

            $count++;
            my $str = '    'x$thr_num; #printout spacer
            print $str.$thr_num.'->'.$count.$shash{$thr_num}{'data'}->
+get(),"\n";

        if( $count > 10 ){ goto RECYCLE; }

        #select(undef,undef,undef,.25);
            sleep rand 5

        }else{
            $count = 0;
            select(undef,undef,undef,.25);

        } #sleep until awakened

    } #end while(1)

RECYCLE:
    $shash{$thr_num}{'go'}->set(0);
    print "$thr_num done....going back to sleep\n";
    $shash{$thr_num}{'data'}->set('');

    #clean out temp data from objects here, if needed
    #see "perldoc -q clear"

    $count = 0;
    $ready->push($thr_num);
    print "pushing $thr_num\n";
    goto START;

    return;
}
[download]

Regards, Mario