On 20 Feb 2002, at 17:02, phinney wrote: > Hello all... > > I have a DBI call that returns a long list of names (10,000). I am > using fetchall_arrayref. The call seems to take up 40MB of memory.
Is it the perl process or your database consuming the memory? A list of 10,000 strings (30 characters each) as an arrayref of arrayrefs consumes only neglectable memory on my machine. 100,000 strings consume 17 MB. Play around and check where memory consumption occurs by using a row-by-row fetch method instead of fetchall_arrayref, and performing your query directly with your database. > Is this normal? Am I doing something wrong? Is there any special way > to free up this memory. AFAIK unused memory is not returned to the system from Perl processes. A workaround is to fork() out the memory consuming steps into a child process, the memory of which is freed when the child exits. HTH Bodo
