It's important also to realize that Perl might ... at first blush ... appear to be “positively wasteful” in its memory-allocation. It uses an opportunistic memory manager that does not attempt to “minimize” the amount of memory that has been consumed. What it does seek to do is to provide good memory-allocation with an overhead pattern that is both consistent and predictable, even for programs that might run for months at a time without stopping.

The rationale behind this memory-management strategy has of course been discussed thousands of times throughout the Internet.