From your 'uname' output, you are running on Solaris 10. There is virtually no way that this is an OS problem. There are really only 3 possibilities:
  1. your program is not really ending, or becomes a zombie. This has already been discussed at length.
  2. Your program is interacting with another process on the system, and that process is sucking up the memory
  3. (highly unlikely) Either your program or another process is doing some sort of persistent memory allocation that is not being freed. shared memory is the only thing I can think of here
(1) and (2) can be checked by calls to 'ps aux' before and after runs of your program. The process sizes are included in this list. It's usually not hard to spot the memory hogs. In the unlikely event of (3), you can check with 'ipcs -m'

Update: I thought of another, less unlikely instance of (3). ramdisks (or tmpfs filesystems) can also suck up memory. 'df' will show these

fnord

In reply to Re: memory not freed after perl exits. Solaris. by Illuminatus
in thread memory not freed after perl exits. Solaris. by Workplane

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.