Perl never reclaims used memory to your operating system during the course of your program. It keeps it allocated until the process ends. In the case of mod_perl, the Perl process runs as long as Apache runs, so you won't be able to "give back" memory to the OS. Update: I stand corrected. See BrowserUK's reply below.

However, the lexical scope of BEGIN blocks is the same as any other block, so the garbage collection will have the same effect as any other block structure. Unfortunately for you in this case, Perl's named subs are not lexically scoped, and can't be "cleaned up" as such.

You could however use anonymous subs, which can be scoped and cleaned up lexically, or you could clear out the symbol table entry for subs you declare in the BEGIN block. It's my understanding that doing either of these would trigger garbage collection for the subs. Their memory would be recliamed by Perl but not by the OS. In these cases, Perl would reuse the memory later, so it might still be a solution to your memory concerns.

blokhead

In reply to Re: BEGIN initialization and memory by blokhead
in thread BEGIN initialization and memory by bsb

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