Heh... almost exactly what I did in my recent Linux Magazine column, right down to the 4-byte length header!

And there's some reusable code in there that you can steal, to do "hungry puppies" pre-forking.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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Update: a better explanation of just the forking queue manager is in the previous column, but check the above-referenced column for the final code.