I have a list of 10,000~ URLS, stored in a hash with a user friendly name, that I need to retrieve from a webserver, for local parsing and analysis.

My code seems to have a memory leak, and eventually cannot fork because it runs out of resources.

Here's the relevant bit of my code:

$curcount=0;
$url_count = keys %url_list;
my $pm = new Parallel::ForkManager(100);
foreach $url (keys %url_list) {
    $curcount++;
    my $fname = $url_list{$url};
    printf STDERR ("\r%02d ($fname) of $url_count files
          retrieved.", $curcount);
    $pm->start and next;
    getstore($url,$fname) or die 'Failed to get page';
    $pm->finish;    
}
$pm->wait_all_children;

[download]

I thought of trying to use LWP::Parallel, but it doesn't want to install on my system. If it matters, I am doing this with Strawberry Perl in a Win x32 VM on a Linux Mint X64 host. I'm not sure exactly which version of Perl. The msi from Strawberrys site says 5.12.1, but perl -ver says 5.10.1. The host has 8GB RAM, and I have allocated 4GB to the Win7 VM. The Perl process starts out using ~600 MB and creeps up to ~2GB before it crashes (sometimes sooner).

So, my questions are:

  • How do I stop this from using up all the memory in the VM?
  • Is there a faster way to grab lots of pages in at the same time?

    • Thanks

    In reply to Get 10,000 web pages fast by Mad_Mac

    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.