An application I am writing uses a lot of memory and there seem to be a serious memory leakage I try to track down. As I am far from being a memory expert I wonder if even I am looking at the right numbers and if the baseline information is correct? I am using the following script to check its own memory usage: 
#!/usr/bin/perl 
use strict;
use warnings;

print_size('empty');
foreach my $module (
    'Data::Dumper',
    'Scalar::Util',
    'Getopt::Long',
    'Net::XMPP',
    'JSON::XS',
    'LWP::UserAgent',
    'POE qw(Component::Server::TCP)',
    'Moose',
    ) {
    eval "use $module";
    die $@ if $@;
    print_size("after $module");
}


sub print_size {
    my ($msg) = @_;
    my @lines = qx{/bin/ps -e -o pid,ppid,vsize,rss,command | grep ^$$
+};
    chomp @lines;
    foreach my $line (@lines) {
        my ($pid, $ppid, $vsize, $rss) = split /\s+/, $line;
        print "VM: $vsize   RSS: $rss   - $msg\n";
    }
    return;
}

[download]
and when running on SuSE with perl 5.10.0 I get the following data: 
VM: 15972   RSS: 2324   - empty
VM: 18740   RSS: 3256   - after Data::Dumper
VM: 20968   RSS: 3388   - after Scalar::Util
VM: 21760   RSS: 4240   - after Getopt::Long
VM: 51348   RSS: 15408   - after Net::XMPP
VM: 53648   RSS: 15588   - after JSON::XS
VM: 57980   RSS: 17704   - after LWP::UserAgent
VM: 65852   RSS: 21572   - after POE qw(Component::Server::TCP)
VM: 88616   RSS: 31924   - after Moose

[download]
So if I understand correctly my script starts - after loading all the necessary modules - with 88 Mb memory used? Do I see correctly that loading Moose take 20Mb without even creating classes and objects? Net::XMPP is even bigger as it takes 30Mb ? Is the way I am measuring correct? As I'll need to run several instances of this process at the same time will they share some memory or will this number just be multiplied by the number of processes I have?

In reply to memory usage and leakage by szabgab

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