> So in the longer term, is there a reason the parent has to contain the
> interpreter at all? Can't it just do a system call when it needs one?
> It seems a bit excessive to put aside a couple of megabytes of system
> memory just to run startup.pl.
Well, remember that the interpreter itself will remain shared throughout, so
there's no real disadvantage in having in the parent. The main reason to run
startup.pl in the parent is to overcome as much of Perl's startup time as
possible. Compiling the code domainates the startup time, so the thing to do
is to pull in your modules in startup.pl . That way, it's only done once,
and the results are shared between all children.
I think the thing to do here is fix the memory leaks 8-)
Stephen.
