First be sure that your network is fast enough to handle the stream. No amount of Perl wizardry will receive data faster than your network can deliver it.

Second, try increasing the number on line 40 from 512 to some multiple of your operating system's block size. Try 16384, for example. Reading and writing data in larger chunks is more efficient, up to a point.

Finally, your skipping problem may be caused by data being buffered on the pipe to the handler program. Use the unbuffering trick from lines 19-21 just after HANDLER is opened (line 38). It will help ensure that the handler program doesn't wait for a pipe's buffer to fill up.

-- Rocco Caputo - http://poe.perl.org/