Is this a problem with the Perl interpreter? Not really, but Perl is the mechanism which allows this problem to exist

No. Using the CGI with IIS is the mechanism which allows this problem to exist. If you were to create a CGI program with equivalent resource usage in Visual Basic, C, Windows Batch files or infact PHP you would experience the same results. Please feel free to try this yourself. Note that the Microsoft documentation on tuning IIS alludes to the problem, but does not once mention Perl. No-one is denying anything here but instead trying to point out you are barking up the wrong tree.

And before you start on the fact that ASP or PHP don't appear to experience the same problem you probably should know that PHP (when run as an ISAPI extension and not as CGI ) and ASP run in-process to IIS and do not require IIS to spawn a new process. You might also care to try your example in a PerlScript ASP page to see what might happen.

/J\