The program

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

use List::Util qw(min);

sub reducer {
   my @d = (5,6,7,8);
   my $m = min @d;
}

for (;;) {
   for (my $i=0; $i<10000; $i++) {
      reducer();
   }
   sleep(1);
}
[download]

seems rock-steady on memory consumption, so perhaps there is something awry with the reduce function. This is with perl 5.8.0, Mandrake 9.1.

Update: Yeah, I'm not calulating the same thing, just narrowing the possibilities.