I've had several attempts at installing Thread::Pool, both using CPAN.pm and manually, and I cannot persuade Thread::Tie to pass it test suite amongst other failures. Maybe that's a win32 thing, but maybe not.

However, I'd have to conclude that Thread::Pool is not ready for prime time. And unless liz pops her head up to say otherwise, as far as I know, she is no longer actively developing her raft of Thead::* modules.

That said, I've never found the need for this level of abstraction with threads. Creating and managing a pool of threads is so easy to do natively--usually 5 to 10 lines of code--that I would probably never use (or create) a tool to do this for me.

Please do not construe this to mean that threads are broken or unusable. That would be like downloading Math::BigInt::Roman, having problems with it, and declaring that Perl can't count.

Since 5.8.3, I've found iThreads to be extremely stable and usable, though they do require a little thought and care to use well (no surprise there). On my platform, I would say they are production ready, but your milage may vary.

I agree, it shouldn't be that hard to create my own throttling and pool managing code, but since I am a thread newbie I haven't been able to come up with anything as quick and clean as using the module. I have noticed that without the module I can fire off up to about 10 threads at once without seeing the system run into performance type issues, but anything after that and the actions start taking longer than if there were no threads involved and the thread function (in this case telneting to a router using Net::Telnet::Cisco and getting stats) has a tendency to timeout. Example of what I am doing with Thead::Pool:

*In my case @values is a list of IP addresses usually between 25-30 total values.

my $pool = Thread::Pool->new( {workers => 5, do => \&telnet2Cli} );

my $count = 0;      
foreach $value (@values) {
               $thr[$count] = $pool->job($threadUse, $value, "show ver
+sion");
               $count += 1;                                
}
                          
my $index;
my @versionOutput;
for ($index=0; $index < $count; $index++) {
            $versionOutput[$index] = $pool->result( $thr[$index] );   
+                  
}
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