On Wed, Sep 11, 2002 at 03:56:42PM -0400, Chad Kellerman wrote: > But if I was tarred 5 large users from 5 different servers, I ran out > of memory on the backup server and crashed the server. I have found > that perl, once it uses memory it does not release it until the script > dies. Well this is not good.
Just to be clear, this is not a problem restricted to Perl. With most Unix or Unix-like operating systems a process cannot release memory it has allocated back to the operating system. The memory can only be recovered when the process dies. This may also be true for the various Windows operating systems, I don't know. This may have been the problem you were running into, in which case the fork is the appropriate solution. You might have also been running into a problem where you weren't clearing out your data structures when you were done with them. While it's true Perl can't return the memory it has allocated back to the OS, it can reuse memory it has allocated, but is not using, for other purposes, without having to request more from the OS. I only mention this because I don't want you or others reading the list to come away with misconceptions about memory allocation in Perl. Michael -- Administrator www.shoebox.net Programmer, System Administrator www.gallanttech.com -- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
