My only concern is taking up too much resources.

With appropriate care, spawning a thread can take as little as 300/400k. It's just a case of ensuring that each thread only loads what it needs. Your main concern (reading between the lines still) is that sharing a large hash between many threads will cause large amounts of duplication--and your right, if you allow the default behaviour to take it's course, it will--but there are some fairly simple techniques for getting around that in most cases.

It really comes down to only sharing what is required a given thread with that thread. Whilst your overall application may have need to retain a large volume of data in memory, for most applications, each thread only needs access to some small part of the overall dataset, at any given time.

As for the spec, I'm really interested in seeing how iThreads can be used. I'll drop you a note and we can move on from there.