In (eg) the worker MPM, each process contains its own perl interpreter,
so if each process handles one image once in its lifetime, there is a
lot of memory that has been grabbed by perl which is not available to
create more perl processes.
... is what makes sense to me but may be utterly meaningless.
Nope that's right, so you load up one image. The perl process allocates
itself 100MB of memory for it from the OS. Then doesn't release it back to
the OS once it's finished with.
The perl process will re-use this memory, so if you process another image
you don't grab another 100MB, it's just not available at the OS level or for
other processes.
This isn't completely bad as long as your OS has good memory management. The
unused memory in the perl process will just be swapped out to disk and left
there until that process uses it again or exits.
Carl
