On Wed, 3 Jan 2001, George Sanderson wrote:
> I have a mod_perl hash scalar that can store up to 4 MB of string data.
>
> I was wondering what happens to the memory usage after a "delete
> $myhash{large}"?
depends on your os and perl -V:usemymalloc
e.g. linux will "give it back to the os", but i think that depends on the
size. most others will "give it back to the process", but perl malloc
will only "give it back to Perl".
> I was thinking (I know this can be dangerous:-), it would be nice if I
> could tell mod_perl to cache scalars that become larger than some specified
> value, so that they do not chew up too large chunks of memory.
you mean to not cache? that idea has/is-being considered for 2.0, a
thread that combs interpreters not in use for things like this.
and/or looking into implementing 'use less memory' in Perl itself.
