Threads + Re(gex) Baffled!?!?!?

[Cliff Daniel]

I'm totally baffled right now, wrt threads.  I have built a test
program using sockets to pull down just a few lines of text,
parse it and junk the result.  

For practical purposes I have spawned 15 worker threads who
each will connect to a different host (480 Hosts total).  They would
then execute code similar to this:

---------------------------------------
Sock.send('some-command')
Reply = ReadUntil('> ', Sock, Timeout)

if Reply == '':
    return(-1)
else:
    tmp = re.split('\r\n', Reply)
    for line in tmp:
	m = pat.match(line)
	.etc.

Upon running the script you see nice and speedy results at first with
very little cpu usage.  However, the cpu usage grows continously until
the program ends.  I have noticed that when the bloating occurs the
a lot of the cpu time is spent in the kernel which would lead me to
believe this is some sort of locking issue hidden within the 're'
module?  When I put a 'continue' in front of the pat.match() every
thing works just fine.  

With re:
CPU states: 12.5% idle, 18.8% user, 46.4% kernel
26.54% test.py

Without:
CPU states: 19.1% idle, 35.8% user, 10.6% kernel,
0.76% test.py

The pattern I'm matching is as follows:
pat = re.compile('\s+(\w+)\s+\(.+?\):\s+(\d+)\s+(\d+)')

Is there any known issues with locking and 're'?

The system is an UE5000 with 8 cpus, Solaris 2.6, Python 1.5.2

If anyone has any ideas about this I desperately need some help.  I
hate to have to dump this entire project for performance reasons.
I've stripped out EVERYTHING in the program just to reproduct this to
rule out my code.

Regards,
Cliff