How can you coerce perl into actually freeing memory that it has allocated? Perl garbage collects memory from unused values. However, this memory is not actually released from the perspective of the OS. A section from the book "Advanced Perl Programming" states
"For efficiency, Perl doesn't actually delete it; it just sends it to its own free pool and reuses it when you need a new value. It is logically deleted, nevertheless."

How can you force perl to release its memory pool?

In reply to Freeing perl memory? by Anonymous Monk

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