Uhm... Which version of Perl are you using?

I know almost nothing (or less) about Perl internals, but I remember that in old releases the construct (0..4000) wasn't optimized and effectively created a 4001-element list. Could it be your case?

Ciao!
--bronto

# Another Perl edition of a song:
# The End, by The Beatles
END {
  $you->take($love) eq $you->make($love) ;
}