An idea I have often toyed with in such situations is to daemonise the data management. So one process does nothing but insert, update, delete and fetch from the structure. The main program does an IPC::Open2 or IPC::Open3 on the data management process and the threads or forks from the main program share the filehandles to communicate with the data management process but not its memory. For example 
# data manager (short separate program)

while( <> ) {
    chomp;
    my ( $command, $value, $address ) = split /\t/;
    if ( $command eq 'insert' or $command eq 'update' ) {
        eval( "$address = $value;" );
    }
    elsif( $command eq 'delete' ) {
        delete $$address;
    }
    else{
        eval "print \$address;"
    }
}

# and the main program:

use IPC::Open2;

my $pid = open2 my $wh, my $rh, 'DataManager.pl';

...

print $wh "insert\t\"fred\"\t" . '$deepthing01{ fred }{ bert }{ pete }
+[99]';

...

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In reply to Re: Sharing large data structures between threads by anonymized user 468275
in thread Sharing large data structures between threads by Anonymous Monk

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