I thought of that, but I recall reading somewhere that if you allocate a big chunk of memory in perl and then release it (by way of undef'ing the variable or whatever) that memory is not returned to the operating system -- it's still owned by the perl interpreter as far as Linux is concerned. So you can write %dataset to disk and undef it, but w/rt children, forking, and copy-on-write, the operating system will treat that memory as if it's still in use. Thus, you gain nothing.

In reply to Re^2: Design advice: Classic boss/worker program memory consumption by shadrack
in thread Design advice: Classic boss/worker program memory consumption by shadrack

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