[Israel.pm] Garbage Collection Question

[Gaal Yahas]

On Sat, May 08, 2004 at 10:19:51PM +0300, Issac Goldstand wrote:
> Even if the GC does collect it AFAIK it will not release the memory back to
> the system until Perl exits - rather it will save the memory for other
> variables (or anything else in the Perl process which wants it).  Maybe I'm
> remembering wrong, though...

I remembered that too, but had to check. It turns out that in some cases,
at least a new perl *does* release memory to the OS. You can easily
verify this with these two one-liners:

perl -0777e 'big(); sleep 5; print `ps aux|grep $$`;
    sub big {my $big=<>}'                 /some/200MB/file

Which on my system, doesn't free the memory, and

perl -0777e 'big(); sleep 5; print `ps aux|grep $$`;
    sub big {my $big=<>; undef $big}'     /some/200MB/file

which does.

This is perl, v5.8.4 built for i386-linux-thread-multi

-- 
Gaal Yahas <gaal at forum2.org>
http://gaal.livejournal.com/