The hash alone takes up between 12 and 13 megs (125,000 * 100 chars per key-value pair), but 13 megs isn't a great deal of memory on most machines these days. What sort of machine are you on? Are you by any chance running this script on a server or virtual machine with some sort of artificial per-process memory cap?

Another possibility: How do you construct this file that you are extracting keys and values from? Earlier you posted a question about recursive extraction of file names. Is this part of the same script? Perhaps earlier or later in your script (above or below this loop) you have some left over code that slurped in a very large file all at once? Or perhaps your recursion rather than this loop is eating up all of the memory?

In reply to Re^3: Constructing a hash - why isn't my regex matching anything by ELISHEVA
in thread Constructing a hash - why isn't my regex matching anything by perl_mystery

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