Most likely, your problem lies somewhere else as here you clean out the variables you create locally.

Take a look at Devel::Cycle and/or Devel::LeakTrace and Devel::FindRef to see where your program is collecting memory. Ideally, you can eliminate all server/client interaction and use a faked client message in a loop to reproduce the problem.

You might want to change the coding style from

                 our $nick = $clients{$ident}->{nick};
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... to

                 my $nick = $clients{$ident}->{nick};
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