Differences in garbage collection between 5.8.6 and 5.8.8

asiufy has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Monks, I'm facing the following issue: we have some fairly old code. We've been upgrading Perl versions, and it has been running fine on our servers, loaded with 5.8.6. Recently, we set up some new machines and validated that code against 5.8.8. The code seems to work, BUT, as they are daemon processes, they end up eating all the available RAM (plus swap) of the machine. Before I dive into the code, I'd like some pointers, perhaps some issue with the way 5.8.8 handle some specific aspect, so I can target it directly in my code. Thanks! alex.

Comment on Differences in garbage collection between 5.8.6 and 5.8.8

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Re: Differences in garbage collection between 5.8.6 and 5.8.8 by zentara (Cardinal) on Jul 24, 2006 at 17:09 UTC
Without code to look at, tips are very general. Reuse objects wherever possible by reconfiguring them with new data. Sometimes certain objects can be undefined within a sub and it works, but not gauranteed in general. These 2 links should get you going in the right direction. How clever is the garbage collector? Memory leaks and reference counting within Perl. I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Cogito ergo sum a bum	[reply]
Re: Differences in garbage collection between 5.8.6 and 5.8.8 by Hue-Bond (Priest) on Jul 24, 2006 at 18:54 UTC
You may want to check out perl587delta and perl588delta. They document changes between different releases of Perl. -- David Serrano	[reply]
Re^2: Differences in garbage collection between 5.8.6 and 5.8.8 by asiufy (Monk) on Jul 24, 2006 at 20:52 UTC
Thanks, yes, I searched for the diffs but couldn't find them... Unfortunately I didn't see anything there that could have impact on garbage collection... Guess I'll have to start digging through code... What are the recommended tools to help debug this sort of situation (memory leaks/excessive consumption) ?	[reply]
Re^3: Differences in garbage collection between 5.8.6 and 5.8.8 by duckyd (Hermit) on Jul 25, 2006 at 00:58 UTC
You might take a look at Devel::Leak and Devel::Size	[reply]