I suspect that this is not enough code to figure out 'why' your sript is dying. I suggest that you try a massive amount logging (constantly flushing your buffer, or use a non buffering logging mechanism) to find out where.

There seems to be an error in you sample code at the point below:

foreach my $name (@names)
{
  if(!name already_in_database())
  {
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Shouldn't name -> $name ? Additionally, shouldn't it read more like:

if(! already_in_database($name))
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Good luck with that!