-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Moin,
On 05-Oct-02 Slaven Rezic carved into stone: > Tels <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: >> But shouldn't that be just the same, or slightly more (if the memory is >> used in chunks of, let's say 16 bytes, it might alloc up to 15 more).? > > The malloc system will probably get larger chunks from the underlying > virtual memory system (4K or 8K or so). Malloc itself will use smaller > chunks (e.g. FreeBSD and glibc malloc use 16 bytes, I think perl's > mymalloc uses even smaller chunks). > > That's fine, but memory gets fragmented. Suppose you make a large > 1000000 byte malloc, then a 1 byte malloc, and finally free the large > malloc'ed area. The process' memory usage will still be the same, > because the malloc system can't give the large area back to the > virtual memory system. This is only possible if the freed area is at > the end of the heap. Yes, but this are implementation specific details, and from the Perl code you can't do anything about this. What you *can* do, though, is to look how large single elements (an SV, an AV etc) are, and then: * use something else in Perl * or try to fix Perl to use less memory. You are still at the mercy of the underlying malloc(), but that *should* take care of all the fragmentation/sizee/chunked issues for you. :) Cheers, Tels - -- perl -MDev::Bollocks -le'print Dev::Bollocks->rand()' adaptively transition total infrastructures http://bloodgate.com/perl My current Perl projects PGP key available on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or via email -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (GNU/Linux) Comment: When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl. iQEVAwUBPZ9qRXcLPEOTuEwVAQHJ9Af9FUOt9DHcrefS/V55MdoRS50KDjWoe8wu JD5UfmmVHAAoRWp5Y881SoDRY3eoHnIzDfX29xDHz3bIjyeUMJT5rSFYh8gXO8La ljYl64pzYHC0Ebf53FOgHl6DHg3JsB3ljv7QD964t0a61gC5u2w1mhY4mYiuQljH DCM7zyqWZp/PqVWhVvqeURw/8PkdBQC7LCjDSaGVU+T5DjYeZdfdW6tOlD9B8fV/ m4jhWU23ICbneNw+yaqpYMMEbUrNvroBDB0ko/TxF+bAs0XouCta0LhT7SG1/GCA 9sqLbsOtz4ZqR2STZfynLJ0LtdLIJEtCpYkxUXyolsJodWNzx+pE/Q== =QNta -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
