In perl you hardly ever have to think about memory management. It has a great garbage collector, and aside from the issue of it not usually passing free memory back to the OS (but rather using it for new objects) it doesn’t have much in the way of memory issues. One exception however is if you are creating objects with circular references and you forgot to weaken one of them meaning that there is a dependency cycle and so the memory cannot be garbage collected. Fortunately weakening is very easy with Moo or Moose

has back_ref => is => 'rw', isa => Object, weak_ref => 1;

If you start seeing memory leaks, it’s really simple to debug; just use the excellent Devel::Leak::Object at the top of your perl code:

use Devel::Leak::Object qw{ GLOBAL_bless };

Then, when your script exits it will print a list of all non-garbage collected objects still in existence. Look for a few with a high value and that’s where your memory leak is. Easy!