Essentially, no. There is no minimum amount of memory guarenteed to be available to Perl.

The restriction, if there is one, is the amount of memory available to the OS itself. If you are getting "out of memory" when trying to load a small file into memory, this is an OS configuration problem, not a problem with Perl itself.

It means that either the server has too little memory installed for the use to which it is put. Or,

Not enough room has been allocated to the swap space. Or,

That the servers discs are so full that it cannot expand it swap space to accomodate even small growth. Check the free space on the drive(s) on which the swapper has space allocated.

If either of these latter two is the cause, it is almost certain that the first is true as well or that the box has simply too much running on it.