Internal Perl Limits? - the real ones

PetaMem has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hi, I read some nodes on this topic such as Limits in Perl, but they didn´t quite answer my present questions. I need to know present limits in perls interna (perlguts) - mainly for the memory management.
E.g.
Is the length of a scalar on a 32bit machine limited to 4GB?
What secure size can a Hash have until the pointers (which are 32bit I guess) go wild?
I´m asking this, because it actually is possible to have under Linux - on 32bit Hardware - up to 64GB Ram. Therefore the question is whether one can go for this HW-solution (actually faster and cheaper) or one has to buy 64bit big iron (big money).
Any clarification about how perl handles this greatly appreciated.

Bye
PetaMem

Comment on Internal Perl Limits? - the real ones

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Re: Internal Perl Limits? - the real ones by IlyaM (Parson) on Feb 26, 2002 at 13:19 UTC
If I understand correctly it is impossible to address directly more than 4GB on i386 machines. Linux does allow to access more than 4Gb (it can map different parts of 64Gb RAM into 4GB address space) but it requires applications to be written in special way to use more than 4GB. AFAIK Perl doesn't have such support. -- Ilya Martynov (http://martynov.org/)	[reply]