I can bump the read up to a bigger size but that doesnt seem to be the issue for now.

I just added $out_handle->flush(); after writing to it and everything is fast again. Looks like syswrite was being buffered somehow.

Sorry for the hacked code. The module does a few things more than seen here which is why some of it doesnt make sense. Like the bless and returning nothing. I ripped out the portions that I thought were causing the issue and stuck them here.

So, $out_handle->flush(); speeds everything up but I dont understand why syswrite($out_handle, $REQUEST, length($REQUEST); would be buffered.