Please consider the following steps -- they might not lead directly to a reduction in memory waste, but they will make your code shorter, more legible, and easier to maintain/fix:
  1. Run the source code through perltidy to normalize the indentation of code blocks; do so at intervals if necessary, if you find it difficult to maintain consistent indenting while you edit the script.

  2. Add use strict; at the top, and add "my " in front of the first mentions of variables where necessary. You will find there are some unnecessary lines in your code -- e.g. the four lines of $fileN = $form{'upload_fileN'}; refer to a non-existent hash (%form), and do nothing.

  3. Instead of repeating four blocks for each of "file1, file2, file3, file4", put one block inside a "for" loop (there are a few places in the code where this can be done): 
    for my $filestr ( $uploadfile1, $uploadfile2, $uploadfile3, $uploadfil
+e4 ) {
    # use $filestr where your code currently uses $uploadfileN...
}

    [download]
    It would be even easier if you loaded your filename params into an array instead of four distinct scalars -- then you just loop (or grep) over that array.

  4. Wherever you have the same quoted string used in multiple print statements, assign the constant part(s) to a variable, and use the variable in the print statements. (Step 3 will take care of a lot of this, but there may still be more to do.)

The last two items are simply applying the rule: "don't repeat yourself". When you decide something needs to be changed or fixed, you should only have to do it once, not four (or eight or sixteen) times.

As for diagnosing the memory consumption, this would be easier if you have shell access to the server, but if you don't have that, look for a way to check on memory consumption within the running script (ask for help on that from your sysadmins, or here at PM -- the approach will probably depend on the server), and have the script write reports to a log file that you can inspect after the script finishes. The reports should be done at different strategic points in the code, and should include time information along with memory size.

(As it stands, I don't see anything that's an obvious memory no-no, unless all four uploaded files are somehow being held in RAM for reasons that are not evident in your code.)

In reply to Re^5: Poorly written script by graff
in thread Poorly written script by Baffled

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