Those forked processes are not really taking up all that memory. The copy-on-write feature of Linux (and most modern OSes) makes them share all of the read-only parts of the parent process, although you can't see this in top. To prove it to yourself, look at the output of free and then spawn a few copies. You'll see you don't actually lose a GB of RAM each time.

Perl threads typically use more RAM than forked processes. This is because they copy every data structure except the ones you mark as shared and get no copy-on-write help from the OS.

In reply to Re: Perl Threads and multi-core CPUs by perrin
in thread Perl Threads and multi-core CPUs by haidut

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