I'd go with wazzuteke's comments re prodn.
I wrote a RADIUS pkt handler for an ISP that runs 24/7 in threads just fine.
I thought the default Perl build inc threads automatically (at least on Linux).
FYI, if you are on Linux, I noticed that 2.4 kernel shows each thr as a separate process, whereas 2.6 kernel you only see 1 process in 'top'.

Cheers
Chris