Alas, that doesn't solve my problem.

(If you peek a bit deeper into Use more threads., you'll see my comments/efforts in that regard)

My problem is that I've got big objects residing in an apartment thread. (btw, I am using an editbin'd perl w/ only 32K stack reserve). I've injected enough print's while monitoring process size to see that each thread is chewing up 9-10 meg, much of it due to DBI + a big pure Perl DBD. Having played with the various embedded data in the DBD, I know its the ithreads cloned bytecode thats sucking up all the RAM.

With iCOW, my hunch/hope is the incremental per-thread growth would drop drastically.