Controlling (and skipping) 'stacked' events

I remain confused about a technique that I'm sure is available in Event,
but I can't puzzle it out.

Say I have two events, both 'timer' type.  One event is a 'heartbeat'
report to another process, saying "I'm still alive, and I processed N
requests since the last time I talked to you."  The other event is (as
you might guess), "process some number of things".

My problem is that sometimes the second event takes a pretty long time,
so long that the first event's scheduled time to run elapses, then
elapses again, and sometimes even a third time.  As a result, I get
reports from this event that look like--

10:12:42.055  Did 97 things
10:12:42.059  Did 0 things
10:12:42.063  Did 0 things

How does an event handler recognize when it has more than one pending
event?  (Probably using $watcher->pending, if I read the perldoc
correctly.)  And how can it (the event handler) unqueue the pending
events for itself?  Just "$watcher->stop and $watcher->start"?  Does
this have side effects that I need to check for?


-- 
Jeff Boes                                      vox 269.226.9550 ext 24
Database Engineer                                     fax 269.349.9076
Nexcerpt, Inc.                                 http://www.nexcerpt.com
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