Hi, I'm using a 3rd party package in my long running perl program that is leaking memory, I properly (I think) remove the variable that contains the object when I'm done with it but it's memory does not free. Consider this example:

my $hash = {1 => 2, 3 => 4};
my $retval = \$hash;

I've been using Devel::Peek so I can see $hash has a refcount of 2. Now all I have access to is $retval in my program, how can I decrease the reference count of $hash? I haven't seemed to be able to figure out how to use SvREFCNT_dec correctly in this situation. Of course $retval has a refcount of 1, so it is correctly free'd but $hash is not because it has a refcount of 2.

This is a simplified example of course, the 3rd party module I am using gives me a hash reference that probably has circular references in it which is why it doesn't get garbage collected properly.

Thanks for any help! I can of course just wrap this program in another that restarts it whenever it's memory usage gets to be to much, but I thought I would ask if this method was available.

In reply to reduce reference count of hash by perlseeker5

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