I'm currently using Data::Dumper to simply write the contents of the memory to disk and to load them back in again when the program is restarted -- is there any specific reason I should be using Storable instead? I read the pod for it and it looks like it basically does the same thing I'm doing with Data::Dumper.
Data::Dumper actually expands the data structure into human- and perl-readable form, which requires re-parsing it when you want to use it again. Storable works more like serialization in Java, in that a portable binary representation of the Perl variable is made, preserving things like blessed references and the like. I suspect Storable is going to be a little more efficient if all you want to do is store and retrieve the Perl structure.