I figured it was a known issue, thanks.
Annoyance is that that the thing doesn't have to be recursive, guess I have to use a skip list to destroy the thing in chunks.
The code for tesing this and finding the limit is trivial: 
#!/opt/bin/perl

use strict;

select STDERR;
$| = 1;

print "\nCount, Last value:\n";

for my $count ( 2**15 .. 2**18)
{
    print "Testing: $count -> ";

    my $head    = [];

    my $node    = $head;

    ( $node ) = @{ $node } = ( [], $_ )
    for  1 .. $count;

    bless $node, 'TailNode';

    my $value  = '';

    for( $node = $head ; @$node ; )
    {
        ( $node, $value )   = @$node;
    }

    print "$value\n";

    # $head goes out of scope and segfaults here.
}

package TailNode;

DESTROY
{
    print "Destroying $_[0]\n";
}

__END__

Trial runs:

Teseting: 37405 -> 37405
Destroying TailNode=ARRAY(0x82d7f40)
Teseting: 37406 -> 37406
Destroying TailNode=ARRAY(0x83425b0)
Teseting: 37407 -> 37407
Segmentation fault

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In reply to Re: Oddity with memory manglement in 5.8.8, 5.10.0 by lembark
in thread Oddity with memory manglement in 5.8.8, 5.10.0 by lembark

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