Yes using top, but it keeps growing and then gets killed by OS after running for a while. Then using backticks I narrowed it down to the code segment that seemed to be causing it, and since it seems like a suspicious part of the code in that it's the only part that uses this 3rd party module I thought it might be it and investigated further which lead to my question about how to reduce the ref count of a hash that I only have a reference to.