There's something else I thought of which might help reduce the footprint and which didn't occurr to me when I wrote my last post.

You can remove the POD documentation or even all comments from the modules. Naturally, you can skip all .pod files. Removing the documentation et all can be done using Adam Kennedy's Perl::Squish module.

Apart from that, if you have some /tmp space during the run and aren't worrying too much about startup performance, you can put all modules into a .par archive which is nothing but a glorified .zip file. Then, before loading the modules, do a "use PAR '/path/to/your/par/files/*.par';". Of course, all modules required by PAR itself need to be accessible from outside such a .par distribution.

You can even combine these two steps by using the PAR::Filter::Squish module.

Steffen