Okay, thanks for that! I would like however like to be enlightened more: ;)

1. I'd rather not use a solution using external modules, since the collector will have to run on MANY hosts as painlessly and non-intrusively as possible. Is there a high performance approach without external modules?
2. I am unsure as to how much data should be read from the pipe at a time in order to optimise throughput as much as possible...

-0xbeef