I apologize in advance if this is not the right mailing list. I looked through the myriad of perl's mailing lists and couldn't find anything for advanced internal knowledge outside of this xs list.
We have a rather large object/reference graph of blessed objects and make use of circular references. This is a legacy app which runs on perl 5.8 and mod_perl. Because of hundreds of thousands of objects which are loaded and the persistence of the apache child processes, we are facing memory leaks over time. Basically, in a simple example, there are parent->child->parent associations. Things are not always loaded in a hierarchical order, so one create the child and then load the parent. (It's a home grown ORM system). We recently went down the path of weakening the child to parent association end of the graph, though allowing both to be discarded as they go out of scope. The issue we're facing is that at times during the rather large/complex request cycle, we still retain reference to the child and when trying to associate to the parent, we of course get an undefined reference. One solution is to use a proxy with AUTOLOAD as a replacement for the weak references and though check for such undefined associations on both sides. This is a huge project due to the various ways we interact with the object and we'd love to see if there is a better way. One way I'm thinking of is to overwrite the DESTROY method and capture the parent destruction before it has a chance to disassociate itself from the child. What I want to do in that case, is instead of leaving an undefined reference, replace all references with a pointer to a proxy mentioned above, allowing it to autoload next time around if the destructed parent is accessed again. Looking at devel::peek, I can see what seems to be list of referents to the object, so that information is I believe maintained. What I'd love to find out whether it's possible, is for me to walk the list of graph of referents and replace all references to the object being destroy with a proxy and then allow the object to go out of scope. Any ideas if this is possible and where to look (I've looked around, but haven't found any documentation/writing of such). Or is there a more elegant way of accomplishing this? Below is a link to some sample code http://gist.github.com/408224 Thanks and apologies again if this doesn't belong here. If so, let me know where the best place to post this might be. Thanks. Ilya
