It seems that for large objects, Storable can work where Dumper runs out of memory: in the following code, dumpsave works, and dumpsave2 fails (applied on the same monster object, a nested hash structure with around 100K leaves).

I like Dumper better, because you can read the resulting file.

Anyway to coax Dumper to handle big objects? 
sub dumpsave {
    my ($fname, $ref)= @_;
    print "saving structure to $fname...\n";
    store $ref, $fname;
}

sub dumpsave2 {
    my ($fname, $ref)= @_;
    print "saving structure to $fname...\n";
    local $Data::Dumper::Indent = 0; 
    local $Data::Dumper::Purity = 1; 
    local $Data::Dumper::Terse = 1;  
    local $Data::Dumper::Deepcopy = 1;
    open (F, ">$fname") or die "cant write open $fname";
    print F Dumper($ref);
}

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In reply to Big objects: Dumper vs. Storable by nop

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