Thanks, all, for the feedback! As I'm fairly new at this, the notion of how daemons work is still somewhat of a black box, and some approaches described here are a little confusing (so you are right, jdhedden!). The daemons will be handling data of different types sent to a single script. Datatype A will be handled by daemon1, Datatype B will be handled by daemon2 and both types are coming from different sources. I am unable to provide code examples since my code rests on a private network, but I'm going to try to implement some form of the suggestions here. I'm sure I'll be back with more questions. Thanks again!
I just recommended this book on another thread, Saving big blessed hashes to disk, and it's even more appropriate here: "Network Programming with Perl" ISBN 0201615711. It goes into detail about preventing memory leaks, long term, with daemons on different platforms and nice ways to encapsulate things and do dispatch stuff.