The hash will be emptied when processFile exits, unless you do something that prevents it from being freed (such as creating a circular reference or returning a reference to the hash).

The memory will be returned to Perl to reuse, but not necessarily to the OS. That means you should expect the memory usage to remain constant.

In reply to Re: Running out of resources while data munging by ikegami
in thread Running out of resources while data munging by dnquark

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