I didn't mean to implicate that using shared memory would be better than an intermediary. I do still think that implementing a simple broadcast mechanism with

I didn't mean to implicate that using shared memory would be better than an intermediary. I do still think that implementing a simple broadcast mechanism with shared memory is fairly easy, provided that you have access to inter-process condition variables. If not, things do get a lot more complicated (e.g. polling, yuck). I don't think I can prove you wrong, per se. I do have a suggestion, though: have you tried using shared memory for data transfer, and using a UNIX socket for synchronization? Only a tiny bit of data would have to be transferred over the UNIX socket (shared memory address to read from, etc), and the rest of the data could be read via the shared memory.