The latest version of threads distributed with Perl v5.20 states:

WARNING

The "interpreter-based threads" provided by Perl are not the fast, lightweight system for multitasking that one might expect or hope for. Threads are implemented in a way that make them easy to misuse. Few people know how to use them correctly or will be able to provide help.

The use of interpreter-based threads in perl is officially discouraged.

I believe this is the relevant discussion on P5P.

You may want to look into doing this with multiple processes instead. A central manager process could take responsibility of handing out reasonably-sized chunks out to the workers. See for example fork or Parallel::ForkManager, as well as perlipc.