Should I learn about any other tools?

You haven't mentioned which tools you know already, so maybe I'm not telling you anything new :)

Anyhow, vmstat would certainly be useful for figuring out if the box is paging (option -p will give details on paging activity). iostat might also be useful (for checking disk I/O, etc.)  To get an idea of what the progam is actually doing (systemcall-wise), I'd use truss first. Dtrace is definitely nice, too, but it might take quite a bit of reading to get going...

Generally, I'd second what stiller said: get more physical RAM, if possible. If your program does need more memory than available (and this is something you can't change), it might well turn out that no amount of system analysing will actually help to make things faster (at least not significantly). Sure, you may have learned a lot in the end, but it's not too unlikely that the program will still be slow... :)

In reply to Re: perl using more Memory Than I have Got by almut
in thread perl using more Memory Than I have Got by alexmc

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.