Re: garbage collection guts

Have you read the FAQ entry on this? Memory used and free-d by Perl is not released to the O/S (except in MacOS, if I recall correctly), so the apparent memory usage will not go down, but that memory is still available for Perl to re-use for other items.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Comment on Re: garbage collection guts

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Re: garbage collection guts by Dominus (Parson) on Nov 13, 2000 at 21:48 UTC
Memory can be released to the OS on any system that supports it. If Perl is compiled to use the system `malloc()` (rather than its own internal version of `malloc()`) then it does whatever the system `malloc()` does. All of which would be an academic point, except that on GNU/Linux systems with glibc2, the system `malloc()` does return memory to the O/S if it thinks that might be beneficial. I was really surprised when I found this out. My Perl program was chugging along, and it suddenly got smaller. I couldn't believe my eyes. I had to spend the next hour digging into the source code of the `free()` function until I found the responsible code. The guy who wrote that `malloc()` package is a genius.	[reply]
RE: Re: garbage collection guts by Anonymous Monk on Nov 13, 2000 at 18:30 UTC
Which FAQ is that? I read the OO faqs (perltoot,perlobj, perlbot, as well as searched PAN && perlmonks 4 garbage collection), but appart from the stuff about self-reffing obj. in the BOT, I did not find anything other than the OOstuff. Your answer explains what is happening here, anyway, so thanks. But I would like a pointer so that I can read up for myself.	[reply]