Hi monks

In one of my app I'm using hash of objects. Each object hold it's own data as key - value pairs which are tied to the PostgreSQL database via Tie::RDBM module. Tieing to database is used to minimize physical memory requirements.

My problem is memory greediness. When I iterate through all key - value pairs there is allocated new additional memory which is not released... :( Function which iterate through key - value pairs is method of this object.

package Elric::Lexicon;

sub new {
  # so a lexicon is basically a hash (of entries)
  return bless {}, shift;
}

sub info {
  my $self     = shift;
  my $num_keys = 0;
  my $num_mu   = 0;
  my $key;
  my $value;

  &message("Buckets used/allocated:\t".scalar(%{$self})."\n");
  while(($key,$value) = each %$self) {
    $num_keys++;
    $num_mu += scalar(@$value);
  }
  return $num_mu;
}

sub bind {
  my $self = shift;
  my $type = shift;
  my $lang = shift;

  if ($type eq 'rdbm') {
    my $esd = \%Elric::System::default;

    # test if connectdb called before
    if (!defined $$esd{db}->{pass}) {
      message("error: can't bind... use connectdb first\n");
      return 0;
    }

    eval "use Tie::RDBM;" if ! defined $INC{'Tie::RDBM.pm'};
    tie (%$self, 'Tie::RDBM', {
                    db         => "dbi:$$esd{db}->{type}:".
                                  "dbname=$$esd{db}->{name};".
                                  "host=$$esd{db}->{host};".
                                  "port=$$esd{db}->{port};",
                    user       => $$esd{db}->{user},
                    password   => $$esd{db}->{pass},
                    table      => $lang,
                    create     => 1,
                    drop       => 1,
                    autocommit => 1,
                    DEBUG      => 0
                       }) or die $!;
  }

  return 1;
}

...
[download]

This code is called from the main program

use Elric::Lexicon;
my %lexicon = ();
...
$lexicon{'EN'} = Elric::Lexicon->new;
$lexicon{'EN'}->bind('rdbm', 'EN');
...

my $mind_units = 0;

foreach (sort keys %lexicon) {            # iterate all present lexica
  &message("Lexicon $_:\t");              # name the current lexicon
  $mind_units += $lexicon{$_}->info();    # print information about it
+s internals
}
[download]

Any suggestions welcome