Re: Re: Garbage Collection on Hash delete

Perl will release memory back to your C runtime library. Depending on what that is, memory may well get released back to the system. This has worked for years on VMS and MacOS, and reasonably recent versions of glibc will also release memory in some circumstances back to the system.

Comment on Re: Re: Garbage Collection on Hash delete

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Re: Re: Re: Garbage Collection on Hash delete by CountZero (Bishop) on Jan 13, 2003 at 22:10 UTC
Well I have to work within a Windows environment and use pre-compiled versions of PERL, so I don't know if my version of PERL (Activestate) is bright enough to release memory back to the pool. CountZero "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Re: Garbage Collection on Hash delete by Elian (Parson) on Jan 13, 2003 at 23:30 UTC
Windows is generally clever enough to reclaim unused space. Unused space will only get returned if an entire chunk is empty, though, which may not happen. Often a big allocation will be carved into several pieces, and if even one of those pieces isn't empty the memory won't get returned.	[reply]