We had the same problem - traced to a buggy version of GCC - our production version is buggy gcc 2.95.4

The solution was to

1) Use a GLOBAL scope for the offending large hash - I know it runs against the grain, but you DONT want it to go out of scope or your process will sit around for ages running buggy malloc() reshuffles.

2) Use POSIX::_exit($exitval); instead of exit() - this exits immediately without bothering to do the last garbage collection

For us, with hashes of 200MB - 1.2GB this reduces task times from 35 minutes to 5 minutes!

Regards

Jeff

In reply to Re: freeing hashes on Linux by jaa
in thread freeing hashes on Linux by hemantj

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