LPM: File reading performance

[Rich Bowen]

llang at baywestpaper.com wrote:
> 
> Well - not having worked much (read: at all) with benchmarking, I
> cut/pasted/messed with this code and kicked it off.  Works great with a
> file of 4Mb, but a 6Mb file gives an "Out Of Memory!" error on the slurp
> (the other two work fine with that size).
> 
> Can somebody shed some light on what the memory limitations are.  I'm
> running ActiveState build 521 with 128 Meg Ram.  Is it a DOS limitation?

Might be. Perl itself will let you slurp in a file up to the size of
physical memory. Other languages (not that I know any other languages,
but I've heard) have a hard limit on the size of file that you can slurp
in. Perhaps somehow DOS gets in the way of what Perl is trying to do. Or
perhaps stuff in a DOS shell runs in a protected memory space.

Rich
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