That's not an easy question to answer when dealing with complex objects, because they can contain refrences to other objects (which might be shared between two or more obejcts you cache).

The only way to get the info you really want, is to know how you are caching it -- if you are just storing it in memory, then the garbage collector is going to make sure that your object, and any other object it refrences stays arround. So what you need to do a complete traversal of all refrences in your object. If you are using something like Data::Dumper, or Storable, then it depends on how you use those libraries -- either way the safest way to know exactly how big it is, is to cache it to a file, and then check the file size.


In reply to Re: How do I determine the amount of memory used by a variable? by hossman
in thread How do I determine the amount of memory used by a variable? by wsloand

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.