[hinkley]

The reviews by some other people here lead me to believe that it works fairly well both when there is something to process and when it's just chattiness.

If you mean Amdahl's Law (and maybe Little), messaging is generally considered part of the unavoidable. However TCP and this library both seem to be aware that while you cannot eliminate messaging overhead, you can amortize it over dozens and dozens of messages at a time and that reduces that bit of serialized cost by more than an order of magnitude.