On Thu, Nov 29, 2001 at 07:17:15 -0600, David Dooling wrote:
> It is most likely not a DBI issue, nor a ``problem'' with perl. It is
> just the perl way to handle memory. In general, not releasing the
> memory back to the operating system increases speed of execution
> (unless you gobble up so much memory your system starts swapping).
And in this case the unused ('undef'-ined) memory should be
the first that's being paged out, if it's inactive. So even
if you'd gobble up tons of memory that's noncritical, if your
complete working set (actively used memory of all processes
on the machine) fits OK in the installed RAM. You'll have
much swap used, but not much 'swapping', i.e. paging activity,
so the machine will not trash.
Then there's "How can I make my Perl program take less
memory?" in the perlfaq -- use "perldoc -q memory" to see it.
> - fork a child process and do the array processing in there
This reportedly works, but is expensive!
-Wolfgang
