I'm not familiar with Xbase, and I'm sure that Tachyon is right on. But I would like to make a general comment on your code, because I've been seeing this alot in my own trials.

As a general rule, don't use "new" in a loop unless you want to keep them. For instance, in your code I would do something along the following:

my $dbname = "dbname.dbf";
my $table = new XBase "${dbname}") || die;

while(1) {
        for my $i (1 .. 100) {
                #pseudo code
                $table->empty;
                $table->read($_);
                $table->display;
        }
        sleep(2);
}

$table->empty;
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That way you are reusing your $table object, instead of wastefully creating new ones for each pass.