Why is this happening?

You wrote it that way, you're storing that much data in memory

Observe 

$ perl -MDevel::Size=:all -le "  @F = 1 .. (5 * 30 * 1024 ); @F{@F}=@F
+; print total_size($_) for \@F, \%F "
6758436
13225503

[download]

5 files, 30k lines each, stored in hash, and stored in array, 6.5MiB and 13MiB respectively ( 19.5MiB combined)

You actually store three times as much data, mostly duplicated

The solution, store less data, store data on disk, get a better system, or lift ulimits on your account

In reply to Re: memory issues by Anonymous Monk
in thread memory issues by asqwerty

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