Eureka! Adding a billion numbers was taking the usual single perl process 26.8 seconds but MCE spawns 8 perls (1 process per CPU core with get_ncpu), giving the fan a nice workout and doing it in 7.3 seconds! 365% faster FTW! 
time perl -le '$x=1e9;$y=0;$y+=$_ for 1..$x;print$y'
500000000500000000

real    0m26.796s
user    0m26.617s
sys     0m0.088s

time mce (your script)
500000000500000000

real    0m7.323s
user    0m55.095s
sys     0m0.127s

[download]
Thank you so much for the example code. I can now see the meaning of chunk_size and how to share data between processes. MCE is a really beautiful distribution with comprehensive documentation and tons of examples (and a couple of cookbooks). I'm just not familiar with the concepts and jargon of parallel processing and was feeling kinda lost, but less now. Thanks to you! :-)

Time for another go at the docs while I figure out how to adapt this to incrementing strings perl-style: 

perl -le '$a="a";for(1..30){print$a++}'

[download]

In reply to Re^2: Getting started with MCE (the Many-Core Engine) by Anonymous Monk
in thread Getting started with MCE (the Many-Core Engine) by Anonymous Monk

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