Okay. I guess I didn't read the POE example closely enough and was assuming a 'normal' POE event driven, single process approach--and it does actually mention forking at the top.

That said, it would be an interesting exercise to see how much calculation the asynced sub would have to be doing in order to offset the overhead of spawning (two?) new processes and all the IPC etc. before it would show benefit over just calling them serially. I would imagine the breakeven point would be pretty high.

That said, this application isn't really what POE is designed for. I think POE is very clever--just rather complex. Going by the list of around 400 POE related modules on CPAN, it seems as if every new problem requires a unique solution tailored to that specific problem? Even then, the applications using those modules hardly seem simple, and the use of POE is far from transparent. Threads just seem easier to use to me :)