The two articles are talking about different things. The FAQ entry on shrinking the program talks about giving back memory to the operating system, which basically doesn't happen, or rather, depends on the OS and the memory allocation strategy built into Perl. The second entry talks about internal reuse of the memory allocated from the OS.

So, both are true, the memory gets reused by Perl but not (necessarily) given back to other programs.

In reply to Re: perl memory re-usage by Corion
in thread perl memory re-usage by mreece

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