You might also like to try this. On my system it settles down to a steady number of threads within 5 or 10 seconds and thereafter creates and destroys threads at the rate of about 7/second with the memory usage fluctuating a few Kb either side of 30MB.

I left this running whilst I ate (be warned, it thrashes the cpu). The thread cycles had reached over 12000 by the time I returned and the memory usage was still locked at ~30MB. And that was with 5.8.6. If there is a leak there, it's an extremly slow one.

If your processor is faster or slower than mine, you might need to tweak the sleep parameter within the thread to get it to achieve equilibrium quickly.

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use threads;
use Thread::Queue;
use threads::shared;
use Time::HiRes qw[ time ];

$|++;

our $N ||= 1000;
our $M ||= 10;

our $aClonedGlobal          = 12345;
our $aSharedGlobal :shared  = 12345;
my $aClonedLexical          = 12345;
my $aSharedLexical :shared  = 12345;

my $count :shared = 0;
my $running :shared = 0;
my $Q = new Thread::Queue;

sub thread {
    { lock $running; ++$running }
    my $tid = threads->self->tid;
    my( $some, $thread, $local, $vars ) = (12345) x 4;
    require Carp;
    require IO::Socket;
    require LWP::UserAgent;
    $Q->enqueue( threads->tid );
    sleep $M/10;
    { lock $running; --$running };
    return 1;
}

threads->create( \&thread ) for 1 .. $M;

my $start = time;
while( 1 ) {
    threads->object( $Q->dequeue )->join;
    threads->create( \&thread );
    printf "\r%d\t (%7.3f/sec)\t", ++$count, $count / ( time() - $star
+t );
    sleep 0;
}
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