Hello fellow monks!

Now that my mod_perl processes are gowing to more than 60mb each, I´m trying to clean up averything I can. Well, it used to be 100mb each, and by eliminating some unused modules I could reduce ir drastically.

But now I´m stucked in the problem of the process memory usage growing big during its lifetime. I have no public variables, and everything is OO. There is some packages which recieves big HTML strings which are latter printed to the browser. Sometimes I can have a 1mb HTML output or even more.

This packages are destroyed by the end of the session, wich is handled by a mod_perl handler (not a cgi file).

I´m doing something like: 

sub handler {
 my $r = shift;
 my $page = new Html::page;
 $page->{html} = '...and here it goes...';
 $page->end(); # Does some final processing
 print "Content-type:...".
       $page->{html};
 undef $page;
}
This "end" sub is very simple, and looks like:
sub end {
 my $class = shift;
 $class->{html} = "Header" . $class->{html} . "Footer";
}
Apache2::Satus says it´s consumes about 27kb before serving a request. But, after being executed, it grows to the size of the HTML it processed (109kb in the example below).

BEFORE serving a request I get: 

Memory Usage for package Html::page
Totals: 68703 bytes, 67.09 Kb, 0.07 Mb | 1284 OPs
end                 27748 bytes | 573 OPs
new                  7045 bytes | 146 OPs
And AFTER serving a request I get: 

Memory Usage for package Html::page
Totals: 151779 bytes, 148.22 Kb, 0.15 Mb | 1284 OPs
end                 109244 bytes | 573 OPs
new                   7045 bytes | 146 OPs
Obviously the mod_perl process grows in the same rate, and it never releases memory. So I end up sometimes with process that grows from 62mb to 120mb in just one request.

Am I doing something wrong? Acording to my knowledge, Perl should release the memory used in the $page->{html} variable just after I undef $page or simply do $page->{html} = ''; Or maybe I´m wrong?

By the way: Linux Fedora 6 with Perl 5.8.8, Apache 2.2.3, mod_perl 2.0.2.

Thanks a lot for your attention monks!

Deigo de Lima

In reply to Memory usage of a "sub" in mod_perl by diego_de_lima

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