Thanks for all the input. I was considering threads, but according to how I
read the perlthreadtut (
http://search.cpan.org/~rjbs/perl-5.18.4/pod/perlthrtut.pod#Threads_And_Data),
quote: "When a new Perl thread is created, all the data associated with the
current thread is copied to the new thread,
So I have a perl application that upon startup loads about ten perl hashes
(some of them complex) from files. This takes up a few GB of memory and
about 5 minutes. It then iterates through some cases and reads from (never
writes) these perl hashes. To process all our cases, it takes about 3 hours
(
