Memory issues

[Joost Diepenmaat]

This mean you have a 8 Gbytes RAM memory computer.

16 Gb, actually.

But if memory was used by perl in a better way, might be the same
programs might work on a 512 MBytes RAM computer.

No, because the data structures stored in the program really takes up
that much memory (though memory usage could concievably be reduced, if
we really needed to, but that's not a top priority for us). The tradeoff
here was also: speed vs memory use, and speed really was the top
priority (which also means significant pieces of the program are
actually written in C++).

The point being, these programs handle LOTS of data and run for months
without leaking - their memory use is about as stable as you'd expect. A
real leak is where repeated operation will continually increase the
amount of memory needed, which isn't what your test case is doing, and
as I said, it's not something I've seen (in the perl interpreter) in
quite a while.