[Melbourne-pm] Perl garbage collection behaviour

[Scott Penrose]

On 24/08/2005, at 16:12, Harley Mackenzie wrote:

> I have an application that I have developed that regularly polls a  
> database table for new records, sleeps for most of the time and  
> otherwise periodically generates some reports and faxes. The  
> application works fine except for the memory behaviour, wheret 8KB  
> of memory is used up for each database poll (running on Windows  
> Server 2003) as reported by Windows task manager, with the memory  
> requirements starting out at about 5 KB and over a couple of days  
> eventually exhausting all of the available virtual memory and  
> causing mayhem on the server.
>
> I initially suspected a circular reference in my Perl objects,  
> except for the fact that if I click on the application that is  
> usually running in a minimised state at the bottom of the screen,  
> and bring it to the foreground, and then minimise again, something  
> kicks off the garbage collection and it then reduces to about 5KB  
> and starts the memory accumulation thing all over again.
>
> As this is a remote server at a client location this is pretty  
> inconvenient and has resulted in some nasty out of hours phone calls.
>
> Am I correct in assuming that there cant be circular references  
> preventing the reclamation of memory as it reclaims the memroy when  
> the application comes to the foreground?
>
> Why is this bizarre behaviour occuring at all with the garbage  
> collection? Is it because it is in a sleep state for most of the time?

It would seem unlikely. My guess is that you are not releasing data -  
or more accurately, some code somewhere in a module somewhere is not  
releasing data.

For example, you often find modules keeping references to themselves  
or other places - which means that reference count is up for that  
variable. Next time, when you release the previous state, you may not  
have released the reference to itself.

> Can I initate a garbage collection in the program itself?

No, it is out of your hands.


You could use Devel::Size to look at what is going on.
http://search.cpan.org/~dsugal/Devel-Size-0.63/Size.pm

Hope you get rid of your niggle - hopefully it is not in something  
you have no control over.
Of course it could always be a bug in Perl - but I would assume first  
that it is your own code - and then a module - and only then perl :-)

Scott

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