I was having a serious problem with Tk::Animation because running a series of very large animated gif's (e.g., 100-900Kb) would eventually bog down the system. I presumed that memory references were not being dropped so the memory was accumulating. That was unacceptable for an application I am developing.

I decided that I had not really looked as closely at the Animation.pm file as I should have. Well, I looked at how the animated gif's multiple frames were being managed and discovered that they were being placed into an anonymous array in the object's 'self'-hash. I couldn't find any place where the references were being deleted.

So I added a function that pops the reference elements off the array and lets them simply die away. I was then able to open and close multiple animated gifs, far more than I was ever able to do with the previous version of Animation.pm.

Here is the function (it seems too simple): 

sub del_frames {
    my $obj = shift;
    while( @{$obj->{'_frames_'}} ) {
        pop @{$obj->{'_frames_'}};
    }
}

[download]

In my application, I call del_frames after I stop using the animated gif and it is available and effective.

I hope that this may be useful to others. Tom

In reply to My fix for Tk::Animation by TomKane

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