the problem is that using buffered IO combined with select is a bad idea from what i understand, and i have seen some flakey behaviour from it, so it might indeed be a bad idea.

Net::IRC is discontinued and has been replaced by POE::Component::IRC which, although most definitely a terrific module, is not quite what I'm looking for.

I'll give the option you listed using print to a filehandle a try, although right now cpu time seems to be very reasonable. even when spamming the bot with large amounts of text cpu time never exceeds 1%. dunno what'll happen when more processing is added though, so any improvement suggested is worth a try.