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From: lm@slovax.Eng.Sun.COM (Larry McVoy)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Subject: Re: Memory leak??
Message-ID: <602@appserv.Eng.Sun.COM>
Date: 23 May 91 20:55:15 GMT
References: <1991May22.151922.4967@cs.ruu.nl>
Sender: news@appserv.Eng.Sun.COM
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mt. View, CA.
Lines: 15

piet@cs.ruu.nl (Piet van Oostrum) writes:
[stuff about memory leak]

If you use the malloc that comes with perl (a slightly tweaked version
of the later BSD malloc) you will use a lot of space.  That malloc does
a power of two buddy system (i.e., very fast, it's about 60 instructions
for malloc and 20 instructions for free on average on a sparc) and does
no coalescing.  It typically wastes about 50%.

Try linking w/ the system malloc and see if the problem goes away.

Note: this is nothing against the BSD malloc, it has traded off space
for time and in perl's case that is a smart tradeoff.
---
Larry McVoy, Sun Microsystems     (415) 336-7627       ...!sun!lm or lm@sun.com