I'm creating some fairly big scalars (6 megs) under mod_perl containing strings, and was doing some memory profiling using Apache::Status. I noticed at the end of the memory usage for a particular sub, in a module, there is a 'PADLIST summary', and that there is some hefty memory usage by certain variables.
I researched padlist and from what I can gather, perl doesn't entirely free memory when a scalar goes out of scope, in case it needs to reallocate it. It does this to save having to do another malloc. Is this correct? I'm trying to optimise memory usage on my server because I also run mysql on the same machine (and an upgrade is expensive). Will this padlist memory get freed up if another process gets hungry? Or is there something I should be manually doing to my scalars before they go out of scope? And if I do do this manual something, will I take a performance hit if that scalar gets re-used frequently in the sub? Thanks in advance. Mark. -- Reporting bugs: http://perl.apache.org/bugs/ Mail list info: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/modperl.html List etiquette: http://perl.apache.org/maillist/email-etiquette.html
