Do you have a suggestion on the easiest/fastest way for me to fix this (I'd like to avoid upgrading the AS perl if possible

The simplest way would be to get hold of the AS sources for that version of perl, make teh one line patch I posted somewhere on this site. I'd look it up, but unless you are prepared to pay for it, I don't think the AS sources for 5.8.9 are available any longer. You might then be able to replace Perl.exe/perl5.8.9.dll into your existing distribution and have the problem go away. I don;t guarentee it, but it ought to work.

Can I do something programmatically?

I seem to recall before working out the patch, I came up with a scheme that seemed to mitigate the problem for the most part.

That involved pre-allocating memory to cover the final size of the growth pattern that is causing the page faults -- in smallish chunks so that it gets retained by the process pool when freed, rather than in one chunk which would be returned to the OS when freed. From memory, this pre-stuffing of the memory pool avoid many of the page faults, at least some times.

Something like:

## prior to the main memory consuming process.
my @dummy; 
$dummy[ $_ ] .= chr(0) x 4096 for 0 .. 256 * 1024; 
undef @dummy; ## Add 1GB worth of pages to the memory pool.
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Worth a try, but I can't find any examples of from that far back and cannot verify it.