Richard, You are probably right that we have paid a performance penalty to get functionality that actually works in a greater range of cases. There are a couple of things to check, though. First, make sure your process is using the copy of vmspipe.com that is in the top-level directory of the Perl installation. Perl will create a temporary copy if it doesn't find the file, but the overhead in doing so can be painful. Second, experiment with the value of the logical name PERL_MBX_SIZE. If it's not defined, we default, IIRC, to 512. Try 2048 or even 8192 if you can do so without blowing your BYTLM quota. And no, this is probably not adequately documented outside the comments in the code or the vmsperl archives. You'll find Charles Lane's home-grown piping implementation in [.vms]vms.c -- comments or suggestions for improvement welcome.
