I did try the following program, it leaks, are these related to my problem?
thanks yan #!/usr/local/bin/perl -w print "localizing tied variable leak test for perl $]...\n"; # 5.006 does leak # 5.00503 does leak # 5.00404 doesn't leak use strict; use Tie::Hash; tie my %tie_hash => 'Tie::StdHash'; my $count = 0; my $ps = (-d '/proc') ? "ps -lp " : "ps -l"; mem_test() while 1; sub mem_test { system("echo $count; $ps$$") if (($count++ % 1000) == 0); local($tie_hash{Foo}) = 1; }