On 5/10/07, Lionel MARTIN <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I suspect that this is coming from data retrieved from my DB not being well freed.
That's right. There are two things you need to understand here. The first is that Perl doesn't free memory from variables unless you tell it to, even when they go out of scope. This is an optimization, and it works in your favor if you use the memory again. You can free the memory from a variable by undef'ing it, but that just frees it up for Perl to use elsewhere in the current process. (This is somewhat operating system specific. You may see processes shrink on some systems after freeing memory, but not always.) What this means for you is that you should never do things like read an entire large file into a scalar, since that will permanently increase the size of that apache process. There's a lot of advice about this here: http://modperlbook.org/html/ch14_02.html The second is that the MySQL client library will load the entire result set into your process unless you tell it not to. This is done with the mysql_use_result option, discussed in the MySQL docs and also here: http://modperlbook.org/html/ch20_02.html - Perrin
