Hmmmm...
I'm running that code as I'm typing this, but nothing strange is happening over here -
Linux 2.4.20-4GB-athlon #1 Fri Mar 12 15:34:26 UTC 2004 i686 unknown unknown GNU/Linux
w/ perl, v5.8.4 built for i686-linux.
Except ofcourse that it takes up about 92 % of my CPU time.
:-)
This is happening on staging server with RH7.3+patches, kernel 2.4.20-4/perl 5.6.1. Don't want to mess with the config too much because then I have to port it to all the production servers.
Anyway glad it doesn't reproduce, guess I'll dig in some more...