Hi Monks,
I have some script which uses some mildly complex data structures and consumes a lot of memory. I wanted to do some memory usage profiling and came across Devel::DumpSizes.
Since the results seemed very strange, I tried to see what &Devel::Size::size (which is the basic function it uses) gives for simple scalars.
The way I understand it, for scalars the results should be the same as length() returns. Why isn't it so?
I started off with bit-vector style values but also a simple example such as the last one, the variable $five, demonstrates it as well. Acording to Devel::Size it coonsumes 37 bytes (?!) what do I miss here? 
#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use Devel::Size qw(size total_size);
my $packed1=pack("b24",'111100001111000011110000');
my $packed2=pack("b24",'111100000000000011110000');
my $raw='111100001111000011110000';
my $xor=($packed1^$packed2);
my $five=5;



printf "packed1 %d, %d\n",length($packed1),size($packed1);
printf "packed2 %d, %d\n",length($packed2),size($packed2);
printf "raw     %d, %d\n",length($raw),size($raw);
printf "xor     %d, %d\n",length($xor),size($xor);
printf "five    %d, %d\n",length($five),size($five);

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In reply to Help needed on Devel::Size by tcarmeli

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