Hi Trizor, Many thanks for your reply - alas this did not seem to fix the leak. The code I have now is: 
   #include <EXTERN.h>
   #include <perl.h>
   static PerlInterpreter *my_perl;
   main (int argc, char **argv, char **env)
   {
       STRLEN n_a;
       int i;
       char *embedding[] = { "", "-e", "sub fred {1;};" };
       my_perl = perl_alloc();
       perl_construct( my_perl );
       perl_parse(my_perl, NULL, 3, embedding, NULL);
       perl_run(my_perl);
       for(i=0; i < 10000000; i++) {
         SvREFCNT_dec(eval_pv("1;", TRUE));
       }
       perl_destruct(my_perl);
       perl_free(my_perl);
   }

[download]
and compiled with perl 5.8.3 still leaks. In a previous attempt (before I posted) I tried assigning the eval_pv() to an SV* and explicitly calling SV_free on it (and also setting it mortal with sv_2motral) but neither of these helped. I was coming to the conclusion that the leak may be inside eval_pv/sv iteself so I thought I'd post here to see if anyone else had seen similar issues. I guess the thing to try next is to build the latest 5.8.8 perl and try it with that. Many thanks, Shaun.

In reply to Re^2: memory leak in eval_pv? by lightspeed
in thread memory leak in eval_pv? by lightspeed

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