Welp a 1k compiled c program that takes ARGV and appends a file seems to be on order of 1000x tafte than launching perl, interpreting a cript to proccess one file and then rinse repeat for that many files. You still have all of the overhead for exec from the main java program but without loading up a 7 mb perl instance for every file submited.

I do really think though that refactoring from a large batch exec to a one off exec is by far the cause of the overhead.