So... if the problem was locked memory (I think there might be some other restrictions that mkie either doesn't know about or didn't think of) then how would a perl user know that it had been exceeded? I'm hoping that more sysadminly people will know the answer since while this isn't a problem I have - it might happen later since you never know when you're going to end up with a restrictive environment. Some form of signal trapping?

mikeirw - that's an idea worth trying. Install some signal traps and see if you can find out what's killing your process that way. Check out the perlipc for more details on the how that works. I'm thinking that if you can just do something like $SIG{SOMETHING} = sub { print "SIGSOMETHING triggered" } to minimally instrument your program.