Thanks for the stats tip. That will help a bunch.

So, I did just put my code in a loop. It sits basically pounding on the roundtrip and fetch operations in the stats. Even when this is happening, the CPU is never more than about 25% utilized, total, including perl, firefox and the kernel.

I'm measuring using vmstat, which accounts for system time nicely. I also did some kernel profiling to make sure nothing in there looked funny. Nothing really sticks out there.