Home/ Questions/Q 7570807
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-30T15:30:46+00:00

We have a pretty big perl codebase. Some processes that run for multiple hours

  • 0

We have a pretty big perl codebase.

Some processes that run for multiple hours (ETL jobs) suddenly started consuming a lot more RAM than usual. Analysis of the changes in the relevant release is a slow and frustrating process. I am hoping to identify the culprit using more automated analysis.

Our live environment is perl 5.14 on Debian squeeze.

I have access to lots of OS X 10.5 machines, though. Dtrace and perl seem to play together nicely on this platform. Seems that using dtrace on linux requires a boot more work. I am hoping that memory allocation patterns will be similar between our live system and a dev OS X system – or at least similar enough to help me find the origin of this new memory use.

This slide deck:

https://dgl.cx/2011/01/dtrace-and-perl

shows how to use dtrace do show number of calls to malloc by perl sub. I am interested in tracking the total amount of memory that perl allocates while executing each sub over the lifetime of a process.

Any ideas on how this can be done?

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The answer to the question is ‘yes’. Dtrace can be used to analyze memory usage in a perl process.

    This snippet of code:

    https://github.com/astletron/perl-dtrace-malloc/blob/master/perl-malloc-total-bytes-by-sub.d

    tracks how memory use increases between the call and return of every sub in a program. As an added bonus, dtrace seems to sort the output for you (at least on OS X). Cool.

    Thanks to all that chimed in. I answered this one myself as the question is really specific to dtrace/perl.

    • 0