And what do you get if you run the exact same thing, but just iterating once, 10 times, 100 times and perhaps 1,000 times, instead of 5,000 times on your system call?

My gut-feeling idea is that the number of times you run your command is probably irrelevant to a large extent. Which would mean that you have a memory penalty for the first system call, but not really for the others, so that the memory usage would appear to be mostly reclaimed by the Perl process between the various calls. But that's only a guess, I don't really know and can't run the exact same tests. But relatively similar tests lead me to think that's probably what you will experience.

In reply to Re^3: Memory Usage of Perl System command by Laurent_R
in thread Memory Usage of Perl System command by pperi2

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.