Are you sure that tech support knows what they're talking about? Perl can take a lot of system resources, but it frees them up quite quickly (if what you wrote conforms to your requirements list).

One issue might be if you're reading the PDF into memory before uploading it and the PDF is large. *shrugs* Without than seeing your script and knowing the system, it's hard to help with this kind of debugging. I'm shooting in the dark, really.

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We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.