Hello monks,

I am just playing around a bit with perl5.8 threads, and would like to write a webserver that can handle many connections under Win2k (well, I know there are OS limits). So I came up with the following code (reduced to the essentials for test purposes): 
#! /usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

use threads;
use threads::shared;
use IO::Socket::INET;
use IO::Select;
use POSIX;

use constant SERVERPORT => 8090;
use constant CRLF => "\015\012";

use vars qw($Done);
$Done = 0;
$| = 1;

my $socket = IO::Socket::INET->new
    ( LocalPort => SERVERPORT,
      Listen    => SOMAXCONN,
      Reuse     => 1,
      )
    or die "Error: couldn't create listening socket: $!\n";

my $in = IO::Select->new($socket);

print "Listening for connections on port: ", SERVERPORT, "...\n";

while (! $Done) {
    next unless $in->can_read();
    next unless my $conn = $socket->accept;
    threads->new(\&HandleConnection, $conn);
} # while

warn "Normal termination\n";

# =======================================================
sub HandleConnection {
    my $conn = shift;
    my $thread = threads->self;

    $conn->send("<html><head></head><body>");
    $conn->send("<h1>Testpage</h1>");
    $conn->send("</body></html>");

    $conn->close();

    print "Connection: ", $thread->tid, " finished------\n";

} # HandleConnection

[download]

This code works fine (although the http-handling is very dirty), but it seems to have a big memory leak. At the beginning, it uses about 5MB RAM, but with every creation of a new thread, it adds about 2-3 MB RAM (if I put a comment in front of threads->new(\&HandleConnection, $conn); the RAM usage stays constant).

Is there a possibility to free the memory used by a thread with Activestate Perl Built 805, or do I have to use a fixed pool of threads (may become difficult because I'd like to write a chat webserver, e.g. like Poor man's webchat from merlyn, but since HTTP::Deamon is not thread-safe, I'd like to build my own HTTP dealing threadsafe module. I really would like to to it with threads to get a better feeling for them; I don't want to use POE because there may be threads that run several hours for outputting data, and I don't want to use fork because of windows, as well as Coro(utines).

Best regards,
perl -e "s>>*F>e=>y)\*martinF)stronat)=>print,print v8.8.8.32.11.32"

In reply to threads and RAM-Usage by strat

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