Soliciing suggestions for application design

[Byron Morgan]

Greetings all,

I need to build an app to do the following:

1. monitor two serial ports: port A polls for data, B carries responses from
a population of 1000 mobile radios
2. match polls to responses based on timing window (between .033 & .066
seconds) after poll is transmitted
3. do something interesting to selected poll - response pairs
4. forward results via inet (as telnet stream or cgi post, not decided yet)

Should I try to do it all in a single program, using threading (haven't
tried threading yet), or use a parent app to do the interesting stuff and
two children to monitor the ports and supply the data? If the latter, how
best to handle the interprocess comms? I haven't started experimenting with
the live data yet, but it seems to me the single most important part will be
to get the timing stuff right (can't be off doing something else while a new
message is waiting to be read).

All suggestions on architecture and methodology greatly appreciated by this
Python newbie.

Byron Morgan