PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 14489 mon 20 0 74188 27640 7204 R 100.0 0.2 4924:43 sendxmpp 27711 mon 20 0 74240 27396 6984 R 100.0 0.2 4859:49 sendxmpp Above is part of the output of "top" which shows sendxmpp in an infinite loop. I don't know why it did that and haven't seen it happen in test situations yet. Strace shows that it's not making any system calls, so something in the Perl code is looping without doing any system calls.