Beefy Boxes and Bandwidth Generously Provided by pair Networks
Perl Monk, Perl Meditation
 
PerlMonks  

comment on

( [id://3333]=superdoc: print w/replies, xml ) Need Help??
undef'ing the array will throw it up and delete any otherwise unreferenced things in the array, or the arrays in the array. This won't take a noticeable amount of time except in the most extraordinary of circumstances. (Like everything in the array of arrays has been swapped out to disk and needs to be paged back in to alter reference counts)

The memory may or may not be released back to the system--that depends mainly on the size of any one array, but generally not. On many systems you need to get into the megabyte allocation range (which means one element that's multi-megabytes in size, or an array of millions of elements) for this to happen, but some operating systems and C memory allocation libraries are more aggressive than others in returning memory to the system.

Making this a my variable and letting it fall out of scope will release all the memory except for the memory taken by the structure (but not the contents) of the my'd variable. So a multi-million element array falling out of scope will release its contents, but the structure of the array itself will remain. (This is one of the space/speed tradeoffs that perl makes)


In reply to Re: Clearing an Array of Array's from memory by Elian
in thread Clearing an Array of Array's from memory by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post; it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:
    <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>
  • Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
  • Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.
Log In?
Username:
Password:

What's my password?
Create A New User
Domain Nodelet?
Chatterbox?
and the web crawler heard nothing...

How do I use this?Last hourOther CB clients
Other Users?
Others examining the Monastery: (5)
As of 2024-03-29 12:15 GMT
Sections?
Information?
Find Nodes?
Leftovers?
    Voting Booth?

    No recent polls found