Re: memory not freed after perl exits. Solaris.

Your OS may be using the missing memory as file cache.

Once the process exits, the OS frees all the memory allocated by it. AFAIK, the only way to have some allocated memory survive the program is to use shared named memory

Perl will not do that by itself. You will have to request this kind of memory explicitly from your program or use some module that does it.

Comment on Re: memory not freed after perl exits. Solaris.

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Re^2: memory not freed after perl exits. Solaris. by moritz (Cardinal) on Nov 23, 2010 at 12:37 UTC
Agreed. Asking the OS for the amount of free memory is mostly useless, since the OS might decide to use large portions for buffering. If you want free memory, don't put it into the computer. A better test is to start a program that needs much memory. If it exceeds the amount of "free" memory, the OS starts to give up file caches, and the program start succeeds even though it needs more memory than what was reported as "free". Perl 6 - second systems done right	[reply]
Re^2: memory not freed after perl exits. Solaris. by MidLifeXis (Monsignor) on Nov 23, 2010 at 16:22 UTC
Are you storing data on /tmp, and is it mounted as tmpfs? --MidLifeXis	[reply]