I have a fairly substantial perl program that processes a list of items. For each item, it creates many, many hash entries in a variety of ten or so hashes. After each item is completely processed, I set each of the hashes to the empty list (I also tried undef'ing them).

After running through 50 or so items, my hard drive begins working very hard and performance slows to a crawl. I presume that Perl has used up available system memory and Linux (RedHat 9 - Perl 5.8.0) has begun swapping.

I am resonably sure that I don't have any circular references in my data structures that would circumvent garbage collection. It *appears* that Perl is using additional system memory rather than being more aggressive in its garbage collection.

Is there any way to "tune" the garbage collector ? Alternatively, is there anyway to monitor the memory space during execution to identify any uncollected/leaking memory ?

Thanks :)

In reply to Uncollected garbage leads to swapping ... by Anonymous Monk

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.