Having read recently Determining memory usage of a process... which talk about Process Memory using Proc::ProcessTable, I thougth maybe making a test that assign a certain|determined amount of memory would be enoughh for what you want to achieve ? If not, I don't know any way of doing direclty such a scan. You could think about a full set of command, system specific :-( , that check that for you depending on system . eg netstat -k on Solaris, free on linux, ... wow there is a lot of system to scan. If so, Perlmonk will be a good place to ask for such a platform's specific command isn't it ?