You are correct, I have used the module just as described in the referenced node. I'm planning on writing up a synopsis of what I had to do, how I did it, and how it all works and stick it under craft.

However, since you asked here's a short answer. I did use Parallel::ForkManager to solve my problem, I followed the following suggestions from the thread:

• I uncompressed each file to a temporary location (not /tmp) and then deleted it after the reformatting was through.
• I made sure that the temporary location was on a different physical drive from the permanent location for the formatted files.
• I rewrote my program to divide the work into 4 distinct sets, and then forked a process for each set.
• I switched to the GNU version of gzip because of this reply (the GNU version is supposedly faster).
• I staggered the initiation of the threads by sleeping for 60 seconds to try and avoid competition for disk I/O.

There's a bit more about the optimization that I've done, but look for it under Craft in the next few weeks.