I guess I was hoping someone might be familiar with a known defect causing the "overheating" or might point me in the direction for troubleshooting it (like check oil and coolant). I've been trying to find out what I can about it. A variable will not be freed unless the refcount reaches zero? So why would Perl decrement the refcount for a shared scalar in a threaded script too many times? Perl is doing something it shouldn't, right?