"Doctor, it hurts when I do this . . ."

Unless there's a really compelling reason to do so, why not just print out the rows directly rather than building a frelling huge array in memory? You can call start_table and end_table if you feel uncomfortable hardcoding '<TABLE>' tags (I wouldn't, but . . .).

Update: You of course need to do use CGI qw( *table ) to get these generated; the standard imports don't autogenerate them by default.