hi ppl,

well as the title says i need some help with this bug i'm having. or should i say, just an indication of what could be the problem. so i have this program that constantly waits for a std input to do something (regular while loop). depending on an input i runs some procedure and it can do it as many times as user wishes it with constant memory usage, because every time the memory is cleaned:

pseudo code or something just to illustrate what the code is doing

use strict;

my %hs1; #...



$| =1;
while(1){
chomp(<>);
do something to fill %hs1 if ($_=~/X/);

sleep 5;

%hs1 = (); 

}
[download]

so the other day my boss comes to me and says: "How do i know that the program didn't froze while i'm waiting for a result, i don't! you have to make this visible somehow...." so i said ok. ( the process that fills the %hs1 is quite long due to extensive calculations it does. (arbitrary precision calculations (with a cutoff) are preformed, so it can take up to some 2-200 min )). since i can't predict how many steps the algorithm is going to do (for some regular progress bar) i decided to trick him by creating an extra thread, detach it, and make a while loop that runs continuously until some thing stops it. in this case the check-point is a finish status(when process is done).(please don't judge me i know that circling around the truth isn't the best way to go, but it's just a quick fix until i get some time to do it properly :) ) :

use strict;
use threads;
use threads::shared;

share(my $var);

#some other hashes not shared;
my %hs1; #...

$| =1;
while(1){
chomp(<>);
_progress();
do something to fill %hs1 if ($_=~/X/);
_stop();
sleep 5;

%hs1 = (); 

}

sub _progress {

threads->new(\&_status)->detach;

}

sub _status {

my $count = 0;

while($var){
  my $bar;
  if ($count == 10){
    $bar = '' ;
    $count = 0;
  }
  $bar .= '>'
  print "\r$bar";
  $count++;
  sleep 1;
}
}

_stop {

$var = 0;

}
[download]

so where is the problem : when i implement the threads, the memory is just getting larger every time i go through the main while loop. maybe this example doesn't illustrate the problem quite accurately but in the real example when i remove the threading everything is ok. my question is : does somebody sees why the threading would cause the memory leakage? (implementation of the threading model is accurately described within the example )

thank you for reading this long post!

UPDATE:

THNX zwon, sadly you found the problem !