Has anyone ever had a problem with Perl and memory issues when using very long unusual values as keys for a hash. I know that most people will use a short simple key like a number, name, etc. but I accidentally started using a very long string with different types of characters (it was pulled from a text file) as the key. When I get up to a certain size in the hash (around 1 million) perl's memory usage shoots up to about 1 GIG from about 500 MB. Hash anyone had any experience with this? Can anyone point me to any articles on Perl hash structures/allocations? Can anyone tell me if using long keys will contribute to Perls mem usage shooting through the roof?