I need to make sure that the processes are spawned as near to the scheduled time as possible (within seconds). Since several jobs will likely need to spawn processes at the same time, I will most likely need to fork (the processes may not return on a regular schedule and I don’t want one bad apple screwing the whole lot of them). I don’t see in POE a good way to guarantee that a schedule update won’t interfere with processes being kicked off at the right time
You just need the POE server running, and for each external process it should start, you use POE::Wheel::Run to fork off that process, thus your server will run continuously without blocking and at the same time it can keep track of the forked off apps and when they finished (and maybe what were the results also)