If you give us more information we should be able to help. Meanwhile, these old nodes might give you a clue as to what your problem might be:

• Losing my memory
• Perl Memory problem ...
• memory leak
• Memory leak detection
• Timing of garbage collection
• Memory is not released back to operating system
• Out of memory during "large" request
• Another "out of memory!" problem
• Memory leaks and circular references
• How to return unused memory to OS?
• Valgrind, Perl, and banishing leaks
• Garbage Collection and undef
• Not able to release memory

General Areas to consider when faced with a Memory Leak

• Stability: Once your process grows to a certain size, does it stay there, or does it grow further over time?
• Large CPAN Modules. Are you using any?
• Circular references. See Eliminate circular reference memory leak using weaken (Perl Maven)
• Scoping.
• File/Database handling.
• Tools. Try one or more from the following section.

Perl Tools and Advice

• Profiling Memory Usage talk by Tim Bunce (YAPC::NA Austin Texas 2013 featuring Devel::SizeMe). Resident size vs vm size, rss, segments, /proc/pid/maps (e.g. SO maps question), malloc and the heap, perl internals, pads, constant folding, arenas, recursion, perl data structures (lots of pointers), ...
• Plans for adding memory profiling to Devel::NYTProf
• Devel::NYTProf
• Devel::Gladiator
• Devel::LeakTrace
• Devel::Leak
• Devel::FindRef
• Devel::Cycle
• Test::Memory::Cycle
• Devel::MemoryTrace::Light

• Devel::SizeMe by Tim Bunce (mentioned in talk above)
• Devel::Size
• Devel::DumpSizes
• Devel::Arena
• Devel::Mallinfo
• Devel::Peek

• splain (diagnostics, splain - produce verbose warning diagnostics)
• perldiag (search for "out of memory", "malloc", etc)
• perlvar (search for "$^M")
• perlfaq3 (search for "malloc", "memory", ..., perl -V:usemymalloc displays value of "usemymalloc" configuration variable)
• How can I free an array or hash so my program shrinks? (perlfaq3)
• How can I make my Perl program take less memory? (perlfaq3)

• INSTALL (Build and Installation guide for perl 5, ... search for malloc)
• perl malloc.c source code

• Perl::Critic - static code analysis for Perl
• MCE::Shared

• As pointed out by dave_the_m: "once the perl interpreter has exhausted all memory, there's very little it can do. There is a reserved fixed buffer to allow it to display the OOM error itself, but doing anything complex like displaying a Carp::confess()-like stack backtrace would require many memory allocations to generate the display, all of which would themselves fail".

General Tools

• Memory leak (wikipedia)
• Memory debugger (wikipedia - contains a list of memory debugging tools)
• Top 20 list of memory leak detection tools (softwaretestinghelp)
• Valgrind (see also: Test::Valgrind mentioned here)
• Clang

Static Code Analysis

• Static code analysis (wikipedia)
• CodeSonar static code analysis (wikipedia)
• Coverity static code analysis (wikipedia)
• Dynamic program analysis (wikipedia)

Testing Concurrent Software

• Testing Concurrent Programs
• Chess: Tool for finding bugs in concurrent programs
• stack overflow question on testing concurrent software
• Intel Parallel Inspector
• Java Concurrency in Practice
• Clang ThreadSanitizer
• Parasoft Jtest

See also: Re: Threads or no Threads (Threading and Concurrency Links)

Security Testing

• Re: Security techniques every programmer should know (Security References) (long list of Security references)

Some Related PM Nodes

• Is $^M a leftover April Fool? by BrowserUk (2003)
• How use $^M? by xiaoyafeng (2021)
• Make Perl use real malloc by creamygoodness (2011)

• Re^2: Do subroutine variables get destroyed? (discusses deterministic destructors, tracing vs reference-counted garbage collectors, RAII, ...)
• Re^2: A short whishlist of Perl5 improvements leaping to Perl7 (compares Perl's simple lexical scoping with Python's global and nonlocal keywords)

Nodes Added Later

• Perl "Out of memory!" Error signal backtrace by OnEhIppY (2021)