title: Perl memory usage profiling and leak detection?
body: <p>I wrote a persistent network service in Perl that runs on Linux.  </p>
  
  <p>Unfortunately, as it runs, its Resident Stack Size (RSS) just grows, and grows, and grows, slowly but surely.  </p>
  
  <p>This is despite diligent efforts on my part to expunge all unneeded hash keys and delete all references to objects that would otherwise cause reference counts to remain in place and obstruct garbage collection.</p>
  
  <p>Are there any good tools for profiling the memory usage associated with various native data primitives, blessed hash reference objects, etc. within a Perl program?  What do you use for tracking down memory leaks? </p>
  
  <p>I do not habitually spend time in the Perl debugger or any of the various interactive profilers, so a warm, gentle, non-esoteric response would be appreciated.  :-)</p>