Thank you for the example. However, I still have doubts. Please carefully consider this reply, my other reply, and BrowserUk's comments.

Red flag for me: Your second script, you claim takes "HOURS" to run. On the below mentioned old system, that script completes for me in minutes. Process memory usage never went above 50MB.

$ time perl script.pl
Called: 0
Called: 1
:
Called: 99998
Called: 99999

real    12m23.351s
user    10m50.800s
sys     0m23.580s

[download]

You're trying to create 100000 threads. You invite a race condition where your script may hit a wall very quickly if your threads do anything non-trivial. You would expect to see:

Called: 367
Called: 368
Thread creation failed: pthread_create returned 11 at script line 4.
Can't call method "detach" on an undefined value at script line 5.

[download]

Your first example will "leak" memory in the sense that the @thr_ll array will grow to 100000, even after threads exit. On most systems this wouldn't be a big deal if your real application caps at 100000 as well, but I still wouldn't recommend it.

I ran both of your scripts on my oldest machine, and neither one had a deleterious effect on Perl 5.10.1 on Ubuntu, running on an 8 year old P4-1.6GHz machine with 512MB. Both ran to completion.

In reply to Re^3: Perl detached threads, loops & my? by rjt
in thread Perl detached threads, loops & my? by expresspotato

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