Question

gurus.

I have a perl script which needs to run in an infinite loop and monitor my gnu/linux’s load average and free ram and send an email using google’s account if the load/ram is above/below the value set.

i found these

Memory usage of Perl script

How can I find memory leaks in long-running Perl program?

and have done as suggested to use undef but that doesn’t seems to help as most likely I have something that never gets cleared/freed.

here’s a sample of how the memory usage is constantly increasing and after a day it can allocate quite much ram.

Here’s the perl script itself. Can someone point me somewhere on how to fix this. Thanks.

Answer 1

Apart from using cron, there are plenty of system monitoring tools that do all this sort of stuff for you.

Anyway – it’ll be easier to check where memory is being used if you write some subroutines along the lines of:

while (1) {
  my $cpu = ...
  my $stat = ...
  if (need_to_send_msg($cpu, $stat)) { send_message($cpu,$stat) }
}

sub send_message {
  my ($cpu, $stat) = @_;
  my $msg_body = compose_message($cpu, $stat);
  transmit_message($msg_body, $from, $to);
}

That will remove a whole bunch of variables from the main body of your script and let you comment out parts of the subroutines to see where memory is used.

Oh – it looks to me as though you are constantly creating $smtp connections even if you aren’t going to send a message. It’d be easier to be sure once you’ve got the main loop smaller by using some subroutines.