in reply to Lots of memory usage with fork&copy

Using fork on Windows Perl is almost every time an error because fork is merely emulated with threads and threads are not always working properly with Perl. Maybe you can tell us what problem you are trying to solve by forking instead of serially copying the files.

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Re^2: Lots of memory usage with fork&copy
by andreidf (Novice) on Apr 25, 2007 at 16:25 UTC
    I'm copying different files on different locations, some are over internet (on windows shares) and sometimes the copy process takes some time or the connections fails.
    Because of this lags I've got to do things in parallel. I have to copy after another process does its job so I have to have some kind of synchronisation.
    I could also execute another .pl everytime but I don't think that that is very efficient.

    I watched the number of threads and it doesn't grow more than 2, so it's ok. Probably it doesn't free the memory on exit&waitpid. Any ideas where exactly to report this as a bug? Directly to activestate's site or elsewhere?

    Thanks for your replies,
    andrei
[reply]
      I'm copying different files on different locations, some are over internet (on windows shares)

      Red flag on the play! You're copying files over the internet using Windows shares? That's wrong in a so many ways - performance, security, sanity... Stop right now and pick a new tool - rsync, scp, HTTP and FTP all spring to mind. All have solid Windows implementations which should be fairly easy to get running concurrently.

      -sam

[reply]
        Security.. not really. It's a VPN connection. Performance? Yes. Sanity? I have to do this under this circumstances.
        I don't control the firewall so I have to use a windows share. I'll try to port the tools to use ftp in the near by future but till then I still think perl does something wrong and leaks memory.
        Please give me hints how to stop the memory leak and don't tell me that rsync is better because I know that. :)
        I found it a little bit strange that just by using win32 module ("use win32") perls leaks less memory by fork,copy,exit. Can you give me a direction on how to investigate this? I am new to perl and I have created just small scripts, nothing complicated or advanced

        Best regards,
        andrei
[reply]

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