That's a peculiar sounding behavior. Is there any way you can reproduce the problem in a suitably short and nonproprietary snippet?

Returning a one should mean it wasn't the problem I suspected, BTW. Leaving that in place instead of using a bare return should be fine. The usual reason for such a memory jump is copying some sort of large data structure, so you might want to look for other reasons that might happen.

Another possible scenario just popped into my head, but it's pure speculation. Are you perchance calling the subroutine inside a while ( <filehandle> ) { .. } loop? If you are and it's a large binary file, it might be hundreds of megabytes before a newline appears. Again, a reproduction of the problem in a short snippet that doesn't give up any private data would be nice.

In reply to Re^3: memory blowing up when returning from a subroutine by mr_mischief
in thread memory blowing up when returning from a subroutine by chuckd

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.