I am often tempted to create daemons in Perl - programs that essentially run forever^*. Examples include various listeners and monitors.

Most of those programs can, and generally are, rewritten by me to run from the crontab, so I can let the OS do the waiting, and my program doesn't have to loop, block or wait. The real benefit of this is that my program exits and returns resources to the OS. It never gets the chance to leak, bloat, and become a burden. Memory allocated to Perl objects may be released to be reused by other Perl objects, but never gets released back to the OS.

But sometimes there is a need for a program to stay resident in memory. Such a program must not leak memory or bloat. In fact it must flatline its resource usage in order for it to continue its existence - long term.

While this holds true for any language in which I implement a daemon, it seems that Perl is particularly unsuited. Have any of you dealt with this issue successfully? Because I sure haven't.

^* Forever in this case means until kernel upgrade.