You've now been given several suggestions:

• use strict;
• use warnings;
• Test by simplifying the script so that it only opens the files
• Make sure to use while not foreach to read your filehandles
• Post verbatim snippets of the code here so it can be reviewed

Which of these have you done?

In particular, does your code contain use strict; and use warnings;?

It's not an completely unreasonable idea to try to measure the memory footprint of your hash, but most monks here would not do that to find the problem. Better to simplify your code so you can identify the problem.

Just remove everything until it runs properly, then start adding stuff back in. If it is a really large and ugly codebase, take the opportunity to refactor and move code out into modules. This is better practise for many reasons and will help you do this kind of debugging by making it easy to use and not use parts of the code.

You could also:

• If you suspect the hash is getting too big, comment out the code that populates it, run the program, and see if there's a difference.
• Try running the program on only one file and see if there's a difference.
• Try running the program on lots of very small files and see if there's a difference.
• Consider loading your file data into a real database such as SQLite and working from there.
• Look for memory leaks with Test::LeakTrace

There, now you have a bunch more suggestions. It will be nice to hear back from you when you've tried some of them and you are still stuck.

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