Makes sense. Bottling out without cleaning up may seem harsh, but provided you ensure that you have saved anything that needs to be saved, flushed any buffers and closed any open files yourself, waiting for the GC to free off all those little bits of memory, just so that you can exit clean is pretty redundant.

If this is your own build of perl, then you could try switching to a different malloc(), if its an AS pre-built, maybe whatever malloc they use will change or improve next time around.