This is a Perl-language CGI script, yes. Its actually for one of several bots I'm writing to help out with wikipedia, if anyone's interested :-)

The buffering was causing a problem - it wasn't something I'd come across before so I didn't really know where to look for the cause of the problem - since it was the first time I'd used threads I assumed that I must be doing something wrong with the threads code it seems my threads code was actually ok.

Thanks for the response!