Thanks, I think you hit the nub of my confusion here. Since mysub is a sub and I am calling it, when it returns I thought everything it created itself (like I assume a large bitmap of the graph in an array for instance) got released? I guess thats dependent on everything inside that sub being lexical. But if chart::clicker complies with use strict, surely it would not compile if it contained non lexical variables (unless there is a no strict in chart clicker somewhere but I can't find it if there is).

So I added use strict to the test script and realised I didn't define $x and $y inside the sub as lexical, fixed that and rerun the test and got the same result (out of mem).

I don't want to copy each array if possible as theres a lot of data to be copied (actually now I realise copying won't really help). I can see that there is a different way to code this by not originally using a large multidimensional hash to sort my data in the first place, but using hashes makes the coding much easier (at least with my present mindset - maybe if I had originally thought of the problem differently it would be fine) - but, surely it should be possible to use hashes in this way?

Re letting the dataset fall out of scope, is there a way of doing this without copying the array each iteration? I don't need the array once the sub has finished with it. I tried undefing after the call to mysub (in the original code each array ref passed into mysub was a different array hash element IE @{$hash{x}{y{z}}) so I used 
$mysub(\@{$hash{x}{y{z}});
undef @{$hash{x}{y{z}};

[download]
but that didn't seem to work but maybe my method was incorrect.

I guess memory leak questions are common but are there any obvious things I am doing wrong here? Is this a leak in the chart module resulting in simply not being able to use it so many times in the same execution?

In reply to Re^2: Out of memory using chart::clicker by Peterpion
in thread Out of memory using chart::clicker by Peterpion

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