To my knowledge no. Perl does not "free" memory back to the OS, once it has it, it is not returned. There is a big difference in allowing Perl to reuse the memory that it already has for itself (e.g. "destroying Perl objects, etc).

Not true on Windows Perl, on unix perl, I dont know. I've heard on PerlMonks that unix malloc uses one continuous memory block for malloced memory that grows upwards sequentially (sbrk style). MS C Lib/Windows malloc uses different non contiguous pools and allocations over a certain size basically go straight to the VM paging system (mmap style) and get random blocks of paging memory. According to p5p, until this or last month, compiled OPs were not freeable or something similar. Weak references used to leak in 5.10, and I think it was fixed in 5.10.1 (personally ran into that). So there is a realistic chance your leak in Perl and not XS modules. 5.8 is very old.

Update, weak ref leak is https://rt.perl.org/rt3/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=56908.

In reply to Re^2: Memory management with long running scripts by bulk88
in thread Memory management with long running scripts by jamesrleu

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