Although I could be wrong, I think the idea was to determine the length of a string in bytes, which has many, many practical applications outside of optimization.

What if you're trying to generate the equivalent of a "Content-Size:" header? Your response suggested that if you need to do such a thing, you shouldn't be using Perl!. That's not very constructive advice.

Is there anything wrong with optimizing your Perl programs? Is Perl some kind of toy language that isn't supposed to be optimized? You've got to be joking.

I think a little insight into how big things are is important, and at times, I'm a little disappointed that I can't find out. If I'm loading half-a-bajillion records, I'd like to know that one structure takes up half the RAM of another. I'd like to know which routine runs four times faster, or uses less disk I/O. Is this crazy?

Once the decision to use Perl has been made, you shouldn't have to give up common sense.

In reply to Re^4: Measurement of physical memory by tadman
in thread Measurement of physical memory by Anonymous Monk

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