I agree that a memory leak is the most likely cause.

It's not my code and I don't wanna get deeper involved as long as the stakeholders keep insisting on their voodoo technologies°

But while consulting I got into an argument with another very well respected member of the Perl community talking about "the non trivial overhead of bless magic" and I wanted to make sure I'm not missing any inner optimizations.

°) aka say qw/agile try-and-error cargo-cult experience pragmatic/[ rand 5 ] for 1..3