From: Randal L. Schwartz Date: Thu, 04 Jan 2007 02:40:02 GMT Subject: Re: git-svnimport failed and now git-repack hates me Message-ID: <86ps9vbjlp.fsf@blue.stonehenge.com> In-Reply-To: <20070104023350.GA1194@localdomain> >>>>> "Eric" == Eric Wong writes: Eric> Part of it is Perl, which (as far as I know) never frees allocated Eric> memory back to the OS (although Perl can reuse the allocated memory for Eric> other things). It does on Linux, of all things. That's because Linux has a smarter malloc/free that uses mmap(2) for the large chunks. On Linux, Perl memory size can apparently grow and shrink nicely. The "old school" advice about Perl comes from sbrk(2)-driven malloc/free. Try: $x[1e6] = "0"; sleep 10; # do a ps here @x = (); sleep 30; # do a ps here and watch the process on Linux. If I'm right, this should show a large process, then a smaller one. If you're getting a growing process though, you probably have a circular data reference. Maybe you have a tree with backpointers, and those backpointers should have been weakened? -- Randal L. Schwartz - Stonehenge Consulting Services, Inc. - +1 503 777 0095 Perl/Unix/security consulting, Technical writing, Comedy, etc. etc. See PerlTraining.Stonehenge.com for onsite and open-enrollment Perl training!