in reply to maximum size of hash

No, there's no maximum (aside from system limits). 7400*65 doesn't seem nearly big enough to be the problem.

Usually perl is pretty verbose while it's crashing. Does it say anything that might be helpful? Sometimes I crash a program on purpose to see what it's doing to me (or I did to it):

use Data::Dumper; $Data::Dumper::Indent = $Data::Dumper::Sortkeys += 1; die "hrm ... what is going on?!? giant_thing=" . Dumper(\%giant_t +hing);

-Paul