I have a Perl Tk GUI application that crashes after it exceeds 4GB of RAM usage and I have no issues exceeding 4GB when running tests in a console application (without Perl Tk)

Operating system: Microsoft Windows Version 10.0.19044.2006 Perl version: v5.30.3 Tk version: 804.036 (latest available on CPAN)

Perl spits out this error almost every time it crashes, but sometimes it crashes without an error: 

Free to wrong pool 678ea0 not e228dd0 at .\common\GUI_TESTS\test_memor
+y_hog_gui.pl line 41.

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When searching for this error, everything I could find was multi-threading related, and our application does not use multi-threading. I thought it may be because we have something configured as 32-bit instead of 64-bit, so I followed the instructions in this question and found that everything is configured as 64-bit. 

perl -V:ivsize          # ivsize='8';
perl -V:ptrsize         # ptrsize='8';
perl -V:archname        # archname='MSWin32-x64-multi-thread';

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Below is an example GUI application that crashes after the memory exceeds 4GB. I have boiled this down from our application and the crashing behavior is the same. The data structure that we use is obviously much larger, so I am cloning a simplified version of ours many times to pass the 4GB threshold.

Note that this sample application does not crash when running on a Centos7 VM (only on the Win10 host) 

use strict;
use warnings;

use Tk;
use Tk::LabFrame;

use Clone;

my $MAIN_WINDOW = MainWindow->new;

$MAIN_WINDOW->minsize(400, 400);

my @dataStructureClones = ();
my $textBox;
my $button_frame = $MAIN_WINDOW->LabFrame(-label => "Test", -relief =>
+ 'groove', -borderwidth => 2)->pack();

$button_frame->Button(
    -text    => 'Run Crashing Operation',
    -command => sub {

        my $dataStructureThatCrashes = {
            NETLIST_INFO => {
                EXTRA_PROPERTIES => {
                    C_SIGNAL => {},
                    NET      => {},
                },
                NET_LIST => [
                    # omitting this call will allow the program to exc
+eed 4GB until after it finishes the loop
                    { NL_INDEX => 0, }
                ]
            },
        };

        my $lastUpdate = time();

        push @dataStructureClones, $dataStructureThatCrashes;
        for (1 .. 5000000) {
            if (time() - $lastUpdate > 1) {
                # omitting this call will allow the program to exceed 
+4GB
                $textBox->insert("end", "Cloning hash ($_)...\n");
                $MAIN_WINDOW->update();
                $lastUpdate = time();
            }
            push @dataStructureClones, Clone::clone($dataStructureThat
+Crashes);
        }
    }
)->grid(-row => 0, -column => 0);

$textBox = $MAIN_WINDOW->Scrolled(
    'Text',
    -relief     => 'groove',
    -background => 'light grey',
    -foreground => 'black',
    -wrap       => 'char',
    -scrollbars => 'osoe',
    -width      => 110,
    -height     => 24,
)->pack(-side => 'top', -fill => 'both', -expand => 1);

MainLoop;

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In reply to Perl Tk crashes when mem usage exceeds 4G on Win10 by boleary

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