Well I don't have enough information to actually run that snippet. I have no idea what dacts() does.

But my questions would start with, what does lsof say? Can you run the code on another machine which is not a test kernel, what does that do? (2.4.0 has a new VM, you may have hit a bad case for it. If you don't have another machine but are willing to post, you should be able to find someone who will run the experiment for you.) How much stack are you eating up?

But while I don't have any suggestions for your problem, I have an unrelated suggestion. You should not be calling srand, Perl does that for you and has for several versions now. It is actually counterproductive to call it again. (On Linux you will be exhausting your system's entropy.)