The array sizes you have imply a total allocation of around 2Gb on a 32-bit system, and around 2.5Gb on a 64-bit system. This might be some magical number that is causing the fork to fail. How much virtual memory do the two servers have? Try running the code under strace, and see if there are any interesting system call errors: 
$ strace -f -o /tmp/strace.out perl foo.pl
$ grep '= -1 E' /tmp/strace.out

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Also, for debugging purposes, please just call date the one time and print the full unadulterated value of $?, rather than three times with three separate snippets, e.g. 
system("date");
printf "\$?=0x%x \$!=%s\n", $?, $!;

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Dave.

In reply to Re^4: system command - OK on 32 bit, fails on 64 bit Linux - why? by dave_the_m
in thread system command - OK on 32 bit, fails on 64 bit Linux - why? by geep999

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