The increasing amount of memory usage does not necessarily suggest that you have a leak (although you should strive to fix the errors you mentioned). It will be quite natural to watch the memory usage increase, since the DirWalk object you've used is constantly storing up some portion of your directory tree. The longer it searches, the larger this stored tree gets. However, you should be careful about choosing a search method for walking directories. Your fileserver hopefully has some final depth, so a depth-first-search (DFS) should not run off on you like it would if you were traversing the internet. A breadth-first-search (BFS) will most likely take more memory since your file structure has a finite depth. Check to see which type of search method your object is using and whether or not can specify your preference. If it cannot, and you don't mind experimenting a little, you could use some of the dirWalk iterator techniques discussed in Higher Order Perl. (I think after I get home from work, I'll post some examples of both DFS and BFS home-grown dirWalkers.)