Our processes do not run and shut down. They start up in the morning, process all events given to it, and then shut down in the afternoon. We're measuring the response time between the timestamp of the event and when we responded to it.
We do have fairly significant IO, both to disk and the network. The files are buffered writes, so we don't think that's our problem.
Wow. Fields is that bad huh? I'll look into lock_keys. I need to re-read the 5.9 fields note on the perldoc, I think they mentioned the moved away from pseudohashes..