[Boston.pm] perl 5.10 memory leak?

Mongers,

I've been trying to track down a memory leak in a long running perl script that uses IO::All to write a bunch of files every few seconds.  I traced my leak back to IO::All which checks to make sure the version is at least 5.8.0 before calling untie.  Pretty innocuous, imho.

Here's an easy way to reproduce it.  In perl 5.10.1, this script causes perl's memory to grow really big.  It appears to be fixed in later versions of perl because there is no memory leak on my mac (perl 5.18.2).

perl -E 'for $i (0..100_000_000) { 1 if ($^V) }'
and
perl -E '$foo = version->new(v1.2.3); for $i (0..100_000_000) { 1 if ($foo) }'
and (slower)
perl -E 'use IO::All; for $i (0..100_000_000) { "file contents" > io("/tmp/filename") }'

Is there a way of fixing my script so I can still use IO::All and not have a memory leak?  Here is one way, but I suspect there are better methods that won't break with a future version of IO::All.

use IO::All;
{
  no warnings 'redefine';
  sub IO::All::DESTROY {
    my $self = shift;
    no warnings;
    #unless ( $^V and $^V lt v5.8.0 ) {
        untie *$self if tied *$self;
    #}
    $self->close if $self->is_open;
  }
}

Thanks,
Duane



Duane Bronson
[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
http://www.nerdlogic.com/ <http://www.nerdlogic.com/>
5 Goden St.
Belmont, MA 02478
617.515.2909