I have a system-monitoring Perl program running as a service on Windows NT which uses several heavy modules. I'm trying to reduce its memory footprint as much as possible.

Is there a way to unload a module from memory while the program is "sleeping"? If so, would this give the memory back to the operating system? (judging from other comments on this site, I think not, but maybe someone can give me a better understanding of it).

Some of themodules are used only used when certain options are enabled. Is it a good practice to do this: ? 

if (Option{blah} enabled) {
    use Win32::Blah;
}

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Also, if I do "use Thingy" inside a subroutine, will this in any way affect the scope within which I can use the module? Will it affect memory use?
Any other tips on memory management would be warmly appreciated. :)

In reply to Modules and memory use by randomblue

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