It hard to see how it could use quite so much memory, but there are a couple of obvious ways to reduce what it does use.

First, you are building an array to hold all the names of the text files in each directory, when all you need is the count. So you should just count in a loop. I notice that the readdir documentation in perlfunc only shows an example of readdir in list context, but for this purpose, a loop is better. If there is some huge directory with 100,000 files, that could use a lot of memory, but that seems unlikely.

Second, although this is probably a minor point, where you say foreach $key (sort keys %category), the sort is causing an array of all the keys to be built. Since this is unnecessary for this use, you can just leave the sort out. 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Carp;
use strict;
use vars qw(%config %category %form %super);
require "/var/www/vhosts/mysite.com/cgi-bin/categories.cgi";
$config{'basepath'} = '/var/www/vhosts/mysite.com/cgi-bin/';
$config{'bluedir'} = 'register';

sub count_text_files {
  my ($dirname) = @_;
  my $result = 0;
  if (!opendir DIR, $dirname) {
    carp "Cannot open $dirname: $!\n";
    return 0;
  }
  while (defined(my $file = readdir DIR)) {
    if (-T "$dirname/$file") {
      ++$result;
    }
  }
  close DIR;
  return $result;
}

my $key;
my $numusers = 1;       
$numusers += count_text_files("$config{'basepath'}$config{'bluedir'}")
+;


my $totalfiles = 100;
foreach $key (keys %category) {
  $totalfiles += count_text_files("$config{'basepath'}$key");
}

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In reply to Re: Poorly written script by Thelonius
in thread Poorly written script by Baffled

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