...one problem that happens with larger systems like this is the systems tend to rely heavily on recursion and this is not Perl's strength :/

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

print deep(2_500_000);

sub deep
{
    $_[0]>0 ? deep($_[0]-1) : "done\n";
}
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#!/usr/bin/perl -w

$count = 0;
my $n = ($ARGV[0] < 1) ? 1 : $ARGV[0];
print fib($n)."\ncount = $count\n";

sub fib { $count++; $_[0]<2 ? 1 : fib($_[0]-2) + fib($_[0]-1) }
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As soon as I tried your "deep" program, I immediately got a "deep recursion" error. I've a 1.6 GHz machine with 640 megs of RAM. I don't know how you could have run that. Every time Perl enters a sub (normally), it creates a new stack frame and this quickly eats memory.

On my machine, it pretty much ground the box to a halt after about 1.5 million iterations.

Cheers,
Ovid

New address of my CGI Course.

If you can arrange your algorithm to be tail recursive, and use the magic form of goto, you can cut the memory growth to zero and achieve some very impressive figures.

8 seconds for 10 million recursions and 83 seconds for 100 million with the memory consumption never over 1.5 MB.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
$|++;

my $count;

deep( $ARGV[ 0 ] );
print $count;

sub deep {
    ++$count and --$_[ 0 ] and goto \&deep;
}
__DATA__
[19:09:45.02] P:\test>422344 10000000
10000000
[19:09:53.02] P:\test> 

[19:10:03.21] P:\test>422344 100000000
100000000
[19:11:26.84] P:\test>
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It takes a little effort to do, but when you need it it is worth it.

---

Examine what is said, not who speaks.

Silence betokens consent.

Love the truth but pardon error.

Ovid,
Every time Perl enters a sub (normally), it creates a new stack frame and this quickly eats memory.

Presumably, you are referring to &sub as the abnormal example where you could use goto &sub to bypass the recursion limit as seen in the following example:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;

print sum( 1000 );
sub sum {
    my ($num, $tot) = @_;
    return $tot if ! $num;
    @_ = ($num - 1, $tot += $num);
    goto ∑
}
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According to TimToady, this actually does create a new stack, but only after the old one is stripped off. Of course you could always ignore the warning, turn off the 'recursion' warning, or recompile Perl to avoid the warning. In practice, I have never needed this kind of technique because it seems that iterative solutions aren't that difficult to come up with. In this case, the formula (n^2 + n) / 2 would do the trick.

And as I am previewing this, I see BrowserUk has already said something similar - oh well.

Cheers - L~R