First, you are building an array to hold all the names of the text files in each directory, when all you need is the count. So you should just count in a loop. I notice that the readdir documentation in perlfunc only shows an example of readdir in list context, but for this purpose, a loop is better. If there is some huge directory with 100,000 files, that could use a lot of memory, but that seems unlikely.

Second, although this is probably a minor point, where you say foreach $key (sort keys %category), the sort is causing an array of all the keys to be built. Since this is unnecessary for this use, you can just leave the sort out.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Carp;
use strict;
use vars qw(%config %category %form %super);
require "/var/www/vhosts/mysite.com/cgi-bin/categories.cgi";
$config{'basepath'} = '/var/www/vhosts/mysite.com/cgi-bin/';
$config{'bluedir'} = 'register';

sub count_text_files {
  my ($dirname) = @_;
  my $result = 0;
  if (!opendir DIR, $dirname) {
    carp "Cannot open $dirname: $!\n";
    return 0;
  }
  while (defined(my $file = readdir DIR)) {
    if (-T "$dirname/$file") {
      ++$result;
    }
  }
  close DIR;
  return $result;
}

my $key;
my $numusers = 1;       
$numusers += count_text_files("$config{'basepath'}$config{'bluedir'}")
+;


my $totalfiles = 100;
foreach $key (keys %category) {
  $totalfiles += count_text_files("$config{'basepath'}$key");
}
[download]

Thank you so much Thelonius, your totally awesome. Your code worked perfectly, I wast sure if I was supposed to replace the $dirname with something or not. I tried it like it is first and it worked first shot. You really really came to my rescue in a way I never thought of. Solved that problem. I'm torn between asking another question, I dont want to be greedy or a mouch, but being such a novice that I am, is there any chance I could post another snippet of code for you to review, its a upload.cgi that has also been deemed a major drain on memory, especially when more than one user is hits it like on friday nights. What gets me is that since I went to the dedicated server Ive been using this same script for several years without a hiccup, but I guess now adays we have many more users and much more busier and all that makes the system have to do much more processing.

Well, just post it to Seekers. I'm going to bed soon, but somebody'll probably reply.

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