Are you sure?... see my second post above. Even when I use the *same* *package* var, there is still unexplained memory growth. Your point about keeping the lexical around to avoid re-creating it next time through the loop doesn't seem applicable. In that case, I'm not using a lexical, nor am I creating a variable more than once.

Update: Here's an even simpler example:

$foo = 'perl' x 1000000; sleep 5;
$foo = 'perl' x 1000000; sleep 5;
$foo = 'perl' x 1000000; sleep 5;
$foo = 'perl' x 1000000; sleep 5;
$foo = 'perl' x 1000000; sleep 5;
$foo = 'perl' x 1000000; sleep 5;
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Here I'm assigning the same value to the same variable over and over, why is memory use increasing? It seems too simple to be a bug, but still seems hard to explain.