First of all, without specifics it's hard to give you any but general advice. With specifics I mean, how does your perlcode look like?

Perl is a memory eater. But in my experience you only get to these huge amounts of memory footprint if you have large data structures holding small items. Eg, a million array items of one byte will take 43 Mb of memory. Array but more so hash overhead is large.

To me it sounds like you are trying to rebuild your PostgreSQL database in perl memory. That would be a bad idea. If this is the case and if you did so because Postgres communication is too slow (I doubt that with 10/s) move to a faster system, like BerkeleyDB (www.sleepycat.com).

About the malloc system, perl normally comes with its own. If you want to know more about it, read perlguts.

HTH,

Jeroen
"We are not alone"(FZ)