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nonnonymousnonk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi monks,

I've written a fair ammount of perl over the years but now I'm working on a script that needs to run for a week or so. I'm just starting to get to grips with the debugger. My script is consuming large amounts of memory, enough that it will only run for a few hours. Everything is strict;
Devel:leak is showing me things like:

old (0): 0 old (0): 0 old (0): 0 new 0248BF0C : new 0248BFC0 :
What on earth does that mean? How do I use it to track down the problem? Is this a red herring? Is there anything missing that compiling with -DDEBUGGING would add? If so am I stuffed, I'm using Activestate on WinXP? I can't move to a different platform because of the applications that perl is talking to.

Alternatively can you give me any pointers to good guides that will walk me through debugging memory problems from beginner to advanced?

Cheers
nonk