This came up recently, but depending on the OS and your malloc(3) implementation you may see your perl process size shrink when free(3) gets called or you might not. Might be interesting to see a table of $^O / $Config{usemymalloc} / "will my process shrink?" across some different combinations.

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In reply to Re^2: "benchmarking" memory usage by Fletch
in thread "benchmarking" memory usage by salva

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