The first time you run the binary, PAR will unzip the contents to a temp directory. This is probably the cause of the initial CPU load.

A problem with all packagers (PAR, PerlApp, perl2exe) is their choise of modules to include. Either they miss modules which you need to manually include, or they find too many dependencies and bundle a huge portion of the modules you have installed.

If you want to minimize the startup time you may want to try the -S option and look at exactly what's in the zip file (rename the file to .zip and unzip it with e.g. WinZip) and then use -X to exclude the modules.

You could also try the -z option to try to turn off compression.

The pp docs.

/J