I'm working on a large Perl progam using POE, Tk, and some large data structures. Since I'm stuck waiting on things that will block and don't want to play nice with the event loop, I figured using threads might save me some trouble. To get around copying of everything when ever a thread is spawned. I kick off a speical initiator thread at the begining to spawn the new threads whenever I need them. The initiator starts up in a reasonable period of time. However whenever the initiator starts up a new thread it takes a long period of time. I would think it would be fairly fast since the initiator doesn't have the baggage of the main thread. Any ideas why I'm wrong?