Excellent Shane. I was hoping to get in my suggestion before you were able to offer some ASOC.
So, I just downloaded and had my first experience with your ASObjC Runner background app.
Very nice. My first thought was "I hope he made it a transparent background app" and yep, it is.
Running your script within the ASObjC Runner, I get 0.00251 seconds on my iMac compared to the and I'm sure the MBP will my shell call to perl took 0.01872 seconds. Your solution is 745% faster.
The only caveat is that the ASObjC Runner must be running, or the first run will take some time to find and launch the app. So, it just should be launched in the Init routines of the script.
Lovely little package. It took me no time to get it up and running. There was just a little delay for the Script Editor to find your app and ask me if I wanted to launch it since I didn't give it a full path.
Nice stuff man.
For those who haven't tried it out yet, the link to Shane's free Objective C Runner app is below: