Are you using threads in the 5.8 series? If so, don't. They're too buggy for practical use.

To get around copying of everything when ever a thread is spawned. I kick off a speical initiator thread at the begining to spawn the new threads whenever I need them.

Most modern systems support Copy On Write (COW), meaning the two threads will defer copying the data until a thread tries to write to it. Also, forking a new process is cheep under Linux, though YMMV on other systems.