Does Data::Dumper have a memory leak?

dragonchild has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I know this has been discussed before, but I have no clue how to get SuperSearch to do what I want. *hangs head in shame*

Does Data::Dumper have a memory leak when working with huge amounts of potentially self-referential data?

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Comment on Does Data::Dumper have a memory leak?

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Re: Does Data::Dumper have a memory leak? by demerphq (Chancellor) on Sep 07, 2001 at 20:25 UTC
Are you using AcitveState? I have the same problem with Data::Dumper for very large structures but not self referential. For some reason `$Data::Dumper::Useqq=1;` sorted the problem out totally. Of course it loses the speed of the C implementation AFAIK, but it works at least... Yves -- You are not ready to use symrefs unless you already know why they are bad. -- tadmc (CLPM)	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Does Data::Dumper have a memory leak? by synapse0 (Pilgrim) on Sep 07, 2001 at 20:02 UTC
Could this node be the one you're referring to? I queried '"data::dumper" memory' in supersearch and got some relavent nodes.. -Syn0	[reply]
Re: Does Data::Dumper have a memory leak? by jplindstrom (Monsignor) on Sep 07, 2001 at 20:39 UTC
Not knowing anything about the internals of Data::Dumper, I don't tink the problem is a memory leak; it is a problem of memory not being garbage collecteds fast enough. In Windows, when I dump a particular 170K data structure the process baloons to 150M and stays there. But when I minimize the DOS window, the memory consumption for the process goes down to normal levels again (as displayed in the Task Manager). This behaviour forced me to reluctantly replace Data::Dumper with Storable :( /J	[reply]
Re: Re: Does Data::Dumper have a memory leak? by perrin (Chancellor) on Sep 08, 2001 at 00:41 UTC
You were reluctant about moving to Storable? Why? It's faster and is generally considered a better solution on the mailing lists I frequent.	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Does Data::Dumper have a memory leak? by jplindstrom (Monsignor) on Sep 08, 2001 at 05:33 UTC
In this case I cared for the human-readable aspect of the output. Being able to edit saved text files is a nice feature in many cases. /J	[reply]


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