in reply to maximum number of lines for negative lookahead assertion (?!)

Just ran it on my laptop:

p3-450 256MB ram running ubuntu linux with perl: This is perl, v5.8.4 built for i386-linux-thread-multi
and it segfaulted at line 10482:
Number of lines: 10480 Number of lines: 10481 Number of lines: 10482 Segmentation fault

Also ran on one of my desktops: Athlon XP 2400+ w/ 768Mb ram running FC3 with perl: This is perl, v5.8.5 built for i386-linux-thread-multi
and it segfaulted at 10079:
Number of lines: 10077 Number of lines: 10078 Number of lines: 10079 Segmentation fault

And on one of my servers: Dual Athlon MP 2.1 Ghz w/ 2Gb ram running FC3 with perl: This is perl, v5.8.3 built for i386-linux-thread-multi
and it segfaulted at 15120:
Number of lines: 15118 Number of lines: 15119 Number of lines: 15120 Segmentation fault

Note: Multiple runs on different machines produced the same results on each machine (I would hope so!) but I'm wondering what would produce such wildly different results on somewhat similar architectures?