Asking this question roots from When Perl is not applicable which makes a war on blog perl site. ;) On the contrary to the author's opnion, I does belive perl can handle large data, but I'm more interested in how perl handle it. and did some tests: 

env:  Win XP, perl 5.12.3, 512M memory available: 350M

C:\>perl -e "@a = (1..1_000_000_000_000);"
Range iterator outside integer range at -e line 1.  # of course!

C:\>perl -e "@a = (1..1_000_000_000);"
Out of memory!          # fair enough ;)

C:\>perl -e "@a = (1..9_000_000);"
Terminating on signal SIGINT(2)  #took too long time, and I have to ki
+ll it :(

[download]

When I ran the third one, perl ocuupied almost 340M memory at first. after 3 or 4 secs, it seems realize there is no enough memory for applying, then the utilization decreses to about 60M and hang. :(

So How perl handle applying of large memory? seems perl would do some swap when memory is not enough, but it isn't productive. It there a better way to make perl smarter? (i'd rather perl tells me "out of memory" than long time waiting).

Any cents? </code>


I am trying to improve my English skills, if you see a mistake please feel free to reply or /msg me a correction

In reply to how apply large memory with perl? by xiaoyafeng

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