Thank you very much. I'm not too familiar with the objects that come back from Win32::Perflib but it seems to be a solution for NT and later windows systems. Also Win32::Job looks quite useful in eliminating zombies from plugins.
Of course the drawbacks are they only work on windows, and not win98 which might need it the most. And I'm not sure if wxperl running from a pp archive will be able to spawn using the perl command like the example given. I'm still looking for a cross-platform heuristic but these modules will be a very useful tool. By the way, can perflib return the overall cpu load of the whole system, or only the process you specify? And it mentions different "levels". Would that let me find overall impact of all subprocesses by checking the load caused by the parent process? Thanks a bunch.
Just for the sake of argument, is there a problem with using Forkmanager and perlfork as discussed above on windows? Also, the Job module says it is good because it will kill grandchild zombies. Doesn't perl work that way on unix? (and is the failure of perl to do that on windows a windows-specific related to not being able to fork correctly? Thanks again.