For a complex hash you'll probably want to use Storable qw(nstore);. nstore is more portable than store and you can still use the same retrieve function. You might need to experiment but below are snippets from code that I currently use. The resulting file is roughly 2.2 times larger than a fixed length text file of the same data. Excerpts from The Perl Cookbook gives some explanation. To save the hash structure to disk: 
use strict;
use Storable qw(nstore);

my %hash = my_build_hash_sub();
nstore (\%hash, "hash.nstore.dat");

[download]
To reload hash from disk: 
use strict;
use Storable;

my %hash = %{ retrieve("hash.nstore.dat") };

[download]

--Jim

In reply to Re: Memory Optimization by jlongino
in thread Memory Optimization by MrOreo

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