Well you're right about DESTROY; after rereading perlobj I see it doesn't actually cause any reference destruction, but just gives the programmer a last chance to do some custom cleanup. So that's out. As for Graph::Directed, it utilizes an adjacency matrix which is why it doesn't introduce the reference problems I'm encountering. I chose to write my own graph class utilizing an adjacency list though since the graph itself must be persisted in a database, and building a table with an 'origin' => 'destination' mapping seemed more natural than trying to store a matrix or translate between the two implementations when moving between disk and memory.

Your last suggestion may well work, although I'll have to make some changes to the way I treat my graph object references. Actually perlobj suggests basically the same thing: "the best solution is to create a non-recursive container class that holds a pointer to the self-referential data structure. Define a DESTROY method for the containing object's class that manually breaks the circularities in the self-referential structure."

thanks for the input davido.

"The dead do not recognize context" -- Kai, Lexx

In reply to Re: Re: Mod_perl, Memory Leaks and WeakRef by djantzen
in thread Mod_perl, Memory Leaks and WeakRef by djantzen

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.