How does the interpreter determine whether a lexical is no longer "used"? You have to explicitly set it to undef? That seems doesn't seem like too much a "feature". So my memory usage won't really top out until all my functions have been called and all my variables used, is that correct?
I didn't know that about AUTOLOAD(). What do you mean by 'allocate additional memory every time'? Does that mean that every time I effectively call AUTOLOAD() (In my case, once for each undeclared function as I use AUTOLOAD() to then declare the function), the interpreter allocates a chunk of memory, or just that everytime I load a module with an AUTOLOAD() in it, it will allocate a larger chunk of memory than it would for a regular module?
I know I miss out on compile-time optimizations for the system, but do those optimizations involve the re-use of resources, as opposed to the allocation of resources (which I know they involve)? I would expect that resource re-use would be a function of the running system, not the compile-time optimizations. If perl allocates memory for eval'd statements and AUTOLOAD()ed subroutines and then doesn't re-use it, that sounds like a pretty serious issue. | [reply] |
I don't know what exactly dragonchild was referring to, except that if you create methods or classes on the fly, that's going to consume memory. No more so than if you'd put the same definitions in a .pm file and use'd it, though. I don't think AUTOLOAD or eval("string") themselves leak memory. And I don't know what "compile time optimizations" he was referring to; eval is as much compile time as what you get when you load your main program or use/require'd modules.
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With regards to the interpreter knowing when a lexical is no longer used ... I have no idea. Anyone know?
With regards to the memory consumption of classes/methods created on the fly ... I thought that it would use more RAM. However, I didn't test it, so I don't know. It would be an interesting thing to benchmark. I would think that it would take more CPU, though. However, I don't know for sure. It's more of a hunch that anything else.
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/me wants to be the brightest bulb in the chandelier!
Vote paco for President!
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