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in reply to Memory is not released back to operating system

Sorry, that's just the way your malloc() works. Some mallocs use mmap() for large allocations, to at least give the process a chance to return memory to the OS, but most hold onto memory until the process exits.
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Re^2: Memory is not released back to operating system
by Argel (Prior) on Mar 02, 2012 at 21:48 UTC
    I thought perl specifically tries to hold onto memory so it can reuse it again instead of having to allocate new memory?

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[reply]

      No, it defers to the implementation of the C runtime library malloc.

      Though I wouldn't recommend it unless you are desperate, it is possible to change the "release memory to the OS" behaviour by building Perl using a custom malloc.

      This has been discussed here many times before, see for example: Not able to release memory and How to return unused memory to OS?.

      From my testing across a number of OSes, I would expect only Linux and Windows to return "large" blocks of memory back to the OS. I would be interested to learn what operating system the OP is running on.

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