You may be right to some extent in your XY supposition but nonetheless I think that a structured dump could be very helpful. This is especially the case because of the problem that I have of memory growth, where a (logical) diff between two snapshots could prove informative.

The application in question has nearly 300 Perl modules and uses several hundred from CPAN. I do not really have much idea of the source of the problem. Yes, I may be able to narrow it down using DProf but memory use and CPU-use may not be all that well correlated.

Interactive debugging is pretty much out as the application is single-threaded and has to operate in real time - delays of more than a few hundred milliseconds are fatal, although I can probably get into a sufficiently quiesced state for the few seconds that would be necessary to generate a dump

I have read perlguts (twice) and other similar material but not found what I am looking for (yet). What I need is a way to walk the heap, finding every Perl variable. If I could work out how to do that then writing a dumper should not be too hard.