Whether the memory is returned to OS or not depends simply on the malloc/realloc/free functions perl was built with. It is possible to get perl to release memory to the OS (with some effort) by building a custom perl with custom malloc et al. as discussed in more detail in Re: Not able to release memory (malloc implementation).

In reply to Re^2: Garbage Collection and undef by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Garbage Collection and undef by Irinotecan

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