Obviously, the Perl configuration changed considerably, and with shared-hosting this is beyond my control.   I installed and used cpanm successfully to resolve the problem.   But I am very surprised to see that the resident-set requirement of cpan is now so large that it would exceed the (understandably, small) limits of a shared hosting provider.

(You don’t even get to install any other indexing module, AFAIK, because the first thing it wants to do is to load the index ... catch-22.)

P.S.:   Post one minute, get three great replies in a matter of minutes.   Thanks.   It’s easy to forget what a really great resource this place is ... even if you hang around the water cooler all the time.   @>--+----