Runaway Perl

[aws910]

So loosely followed this howto:
http://www.howtoforge.com/antispam_smtp_proxy

and it worked well, but after a few hours of operation, perl would just grab insane amounts of memory and severely delay mail delivery. ClamAV would accelerate the problem, grabbing even more memory, so I disabled/removed it.

My question here is this: how can I figure out what causes this memory hogging? I researched and found that Perl sometimes has a problem when the net::dns is called rapidly, so I disabled most of the dns-related checks in assp(RBL and such). Even after doing so, ASSP provides superb accuracy... but Perl continues to go awry after a couple hours, and can only be fixed(afaict) by a reboot.
Here's a "Top" command executed while Perl has "run away".... notice how much memory it's taking(>80%)

top - 06:17:15 up 13:18,  1 user,  load average: 2.78, 2.30, 1.98
Tasks:  57 total,   2 running,  55 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.7%us,  0.7%sy,  0.0%ni,  0.0%id, 97.7%wa,  0.0%hi,  1.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:    125084k total,   123100k used,     1984k free,       68k buffers
Swap:   369452k total,   184720k used,   184732k free,      680k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                                               
 3898 nobody    18   0  189m 102m   64 D  1.0 83.5  14:02.39 perl                                                                                                                                  
 3830 mysql     18   0  123m  800   68 S  0.0  0.6   0:09.35 mysqld                                                                                                                                
 5816 root      15   0  2320  580  420 R  0.0  0.5   0:00.16 top                                                                                                                                   
 5785 mr        15   0  8020  300  184 R  0.0  0.2   0:00.08 sshd                                                                                                                                  
 3711 root      16   0  1700  144  144 S  0.0  0.1   0:14.03 syslogd                                                                                                                               
 4126 root      18   0  2280  128  128 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.33 cron                                                                                                                                  
 4155 root      18   0 20020  112   84 S  0.0  0.1   0:00.50 apache2                                                                                                                               
 4064 root      15   0  4952   68   68 S  0.0  0.1   0:23.26 master

It's true that the box only has 128MB ram, and I can see that Perl's memory-hogging eats into the swapfile... but it behaves so nicely for the first couple hours after a reboot - memory consumption is stable, swapfile use is negligible, everything is great. Here's a copy of the "top" command when things are running ok:

top - 08:40:54 up  2:21,  1 user,  load average: 0.08, 0.06, 0.07
Tasks:  77 total,   3 running,  74 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  1.3%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 97.7%id,  1.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:    125084k total,   121808k used,     3276k free,     1272k buffers
Swap:   369452k total,      104k used,   369348k free,    42592k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND                                                                                                                               
 3896 nobody    15   0 31976  29m 1696 R  1.3 23.9   4:39.70 perl                                                                                                                                  
 3828 mysql     15   0  123m  16m 4796 S  0.0 13.3   0:00.23 mysqld                                                                                                                                
 4152 root      18   0 20024 6016 3448 S  0.0  4.8   0:00.04 apache2                                                                                                                               
 4172 www-data  18   0 20024 3200  616 S  0.0  2.6   0:00.00 apache2                                                                                                                               
 4173 www-data  18   0 20024 3200  616 S  0.0  2.6   0:00.00 apache2                                                                                                                               
 4174 www-data  18   0 20024 3200  616 S  0.0  2.6   0:00.00 apache2                                                                                                                               
 4175 www-data  21   0 20024 3200  616 S  0.0  2.6   0:00.00 apache2                                                                                                                               
 4176 www-data  21   0 20024 3200  616 S  0.0  2.6   0:00.01 apache2                                                                                                                               
 4647 mr        15   0  5508 3024 1444 S  0.0  2.4   0:00.19 bash                                                                                                                                  
 4612 postfix   15   0  5324 2816 2292 S  0.0  2.3   0:00.25 smtpd                                                                                                                                 
 4613 postfix   15   0  5320 2812 2292 S  0.0  2.2   0:00.26 smtpd

It's been running fine here for just over two hours, but anytime now I expect it to wig out. Is there a log somewhere for runaway perl executions? Anyone have any ideas? Thanks in advance.

btw I found a legend for the "stat" field:
STAT The state of the task is shown here. The state is either S for sleeping, D for uninterruptible sleep, R for running, Z for zombies, or T for stopped or traced. These states are modified by trailing < for a process with negative nice value, N for a process with positive nice value, W for a swapped out process

"uninterruptible sleep"? my head hurts....