(I should say my threads equivalent)

Hm. No offence but, Ew! :)

Remember that MCE is a wrapper (actually a suite of wrappers, or is that sweet wrapper:) over the top of threads(and other things), providing syntactic sugar for simple operations.

You can easily do the same yourself. Say write TGrep.pm:

Then write:

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use TGrep;
use Time::HiRes qw[ time ];

our $N //= 1e3;

my $start = time;
my @a = tgrep{ $_ % 5 == 0 } [ 1..$N ];
printf "Took %.9f seconds\n", time() -$start;
print scalar @a;

__END__
C:\test>t-tgrep -N=1e5
Took 3.830074787 seconds
20000
[download]

Of course, you'd probably be better sticking to grep for such simple things:

$t=time; 
my @a = grep{ $_%5 == 0 } 1 .. 1e6; 
print time-$t;;
0.18144702911377
[download]