Sorry, I didn't mean to insult you (or anyone) with my C++ comment. I don't know Perl at all (as illustrated in my code example) so C++ is guaranteed to be faster for me. Plus I have good C++ tools (VS.NET) and no real Perl tools (again, editing scripts using VS.NET).

Fortunately, despite my dismal Perl code example, you understood my question. I can deal with the answer - thanks once again.

Ideally what I would like to do is prevent running the SA startup/initialisation code more than once (or so). This stuff takes quite a while to crank up and will kill performance. If I can't share a single instance, can I somehow "clone" a pre-initialised instance? (Last question, I promise, at least until I get to do some experimentation tonight).

If I can't clone the object I'll definitely have to have a pool of interpreters lying around. I'm not overly concerned by the memory consumption as ActivePerl already consumes a heap of memory anyway, I can't imagine a few more instances of SpamAssassin will make that much difference.

Phil