I have a long running script that needs to cache some data for speed reasons, but after a while it starts to consume huge amounts of memory. As I look through it's memory usage I have narrowed down the overhead on small arrays as a major culprit. The data in question is stored as a number of 6 element arrays. Using Devel::Size::Report, I get the following output: 
Array ref 440 bytes (overhead: 232 bytes, 52.73%)
        Scalar 56 bytes
        Scalar 56 bytes
        Scalar 24 bytes
        Scalar 24 bytes
        Scalar 24 bytes
        Scalar 24 bytes

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Half of my application's memory usage comes from overhead on these Arrays! Is there any way to either reduce the overhead of an array, or find a more compact storage method?

In reply to array overhead by Anonymous Monk

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