Thanks for those suggestions. I'll try and look at the LWP::Parallel module - this is also going to be in LWP3, isn't it? Cool.

I considered using serialisation, but I have a feeling it will be a bit slow - returning up to 100 largish data structures over pipes.

I _really_ like the non-blocking socket idea - don't know much about this area. I guess I open 1 socket for each WHOIS, then wait for them to reply? That would be cool as F*** and much nicer for my OO than multi-processing. If anyone can point me to a place to read up on this, I'd be very grateful again.

David