It seems that when running Activestate Perl (5.8.7) on Windows XP, a perl program which runs out of memory stops 'silently' without writing an "out of memory" message either to STDOUT or STDERR.

I also run Perl on FreeBSD which helpfully will state "out of memory" to tell you there was a problem, which is what I'd expect.

The behaviour on Windows is a concern because a process may appear to start and finish fine, when in fact it may have been cut short if the system runs out of memory.

You could replicate this by filling memory on purpose: 

# Warning: this will consume all of your memory
$hash{$count++}='xyz'x999 while (1);

[download]

So, my question is this: is there a way to somehow get Activestate Perl on Windows to report "out of memory" rather than stop silently?

Note that my problem isn't with memory management in code, but just the risk that if a process DID unexpectedly run out, it wouldn't tell me.

In reply to No 'out of memory' message on Windows? by oxone

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