Hi to the hallowed!

I have had occasion to use Devel::LeakTrace::Fast in the head script of a suite and carped some interesting stats. Well, what to make of the stats is my current query.

Over 65,000 "leaks" are reported (the log is 5mb). Several thousand are from my own code, and there are some from installed modules also. A few questions to get me started occur straight away:

1. Are these "leaks" lost to the host system (reducing available memory until rebooted), or are they internal to perl in the sense they will be recovered by the host system when perl exits?

2. What significance should I otherwise attach to the stats. particularly the quantity involved.

3. Are the authors of leaky modules likely to be interested in hearing from me ..(over 5000 are recorded against Exporter.pm)..?

For some background, I am attempting to track down cumulative system degradation. KDE slows excruciatingly once the "free memory" reported by KSysGuard goes under 20mb, and I have noticed that then the "cache memory" and "buffer memory" reported has usually grown to a total over 300mb. This may not be anything to do with Perl, of course, but thought it a good place to start looking for eliminations!

I remain your wisdom sponge in these matters.

Pstack

In reply to memory sieve discovery by Pstack

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