I have an annoying socket related problem. After a lot of trial and error I have found a work-around to the problem and my code is now functional.

On the other hand, I don't understand why my work-around works, neither why it is required. This is where your help and explanations will be much appreciated.

Scenario:

I have a 'server' application that opens a socket. It then loops around an accept() on the socket. Whenever a client connects, the server reads and (for testing purposes only) discards anything read. It never writes anything to the socket. This part works fine.

I have a test client that does nothing but connect to the server socket and then closes the socket. It writes nothing to the socket before closing it.

This creates a major memory leak in the client application.

If I let the client write some arbitrary text to the socket, the problem remains. But, if I let the client read from the socket, the memory leak goes away (?!?!). There was nothing there to read. The client immediately gets a logical end-of-file, but it will not leak memory.

Question:

How can this be?

Code:

This is a code snippet that reproduces the problem:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
require 5.005;
use strict;
use IO::Socket;

for(1..100000) {
   open_sock();
   }
exit;

sub open_sock {
my $answer;
my $sock=IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr=>'10.118.32.31',
                               PeerPort=>1955,
                               Proto=>'tcp',
                               Timeout=>20)||
      die("Failed to open socket.\n");

# Writing to the socket makes no difference.
#print $sock "x";

# Reading from the socket closes the memory leak.
# Nothing gets printed on STDOUT from the print statement,
# i.e. there was nothing to read. Right?
while(defined($answer=<$sock>)) {
   print("Answer: $answer\n");
   }

close($sock);
}
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Environment:

• Windows NT V4.00.1381
• ActiveState Perl V5.6.0, build 616 (Yes, it's out of date, but I can't upgrade the production server for another good while. Probably when 5.8 is released.)

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Everything went worng, just as foreseen.