I suspect the memory leak is in the stand-alone .exe, not in Perl. (BTW, which .exe are you using?) To prove it, change your program to take the commands that system() had been running, and write the commands into a batch file. Either schedule the Perl job separately from the batchfile job, or run the batchfile by hand from a separate command-prompt window. If the batch file fails, then the leak must be in the commands that it ran. You can then add code to your Perl program to split the backup load into smaller chunks, so that you run a higher number of smaller backups (or get a bug-fix for your .exe).

It may also be helpful to watch the actual stats for memory usage during the run of the backup executable. These steps work on WinNT and Win2000; Win2003 is probably similar.

  1. Start the Windows Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del), click the "Processes" tab.
  2. From the menu, do View->Select Columns, then enable columns PID, CPU Usage, CPU Time, Memory Usage, Virtual Memory Size, Paged Pool, and Non-paged Pool. Click OK.
  3. Click on the "NP Pool" column header, to sort by that column.
See also: Memory Leaks on WinNT

If all else fails, then trim down the program to the smallest version that still exhibits the problem, and post it as a follow-up to this thread.

In reply to Re: Activeperl & Memory Leaks by Util
in thread Activeperl & Memory Leaks by Possumfoot

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