Re: Reducing memory footprint?

Gurusamy Sarathy (gsar@activestate.com)
Tue, 09 Mar 1999 10:11:05 -0800 

On Tue, 09 Mar 1999 16:08:14 GMT, Alan Burlison wrote:
>We're running a HTTP benchmark using perl and the LWP library to
>simulate the user load.  Each transaction is mimicked by a perl script
>that fetches the appropriate URLs, POSTs the appropriate forms etc.  The
>target concurrent user population is 3000, which therefore requires 3000
>perl processes.  This uses up about 14Gb of memory just to get the
>scripts started and waiting on the synchronisation semaphore - I expect
>the memory requirement to increase when the scripts actually do useful
>work.  Does anyone have any suggestions as to how the memory footprint
>could be reduced?  The perl we are using is 5.005_02, with system
>malloc.  Any suggestions gratefully received!

Ordered from "easy" to "hard" (which also happens to be
"reliable"-->"unreliable"):

  + use libperl.so
  + use more than one machine + network
  + use PerlInterp; (single process, multiple interpreters)
  + use Thread; (single process, shared compiled optree, multiple threads)
  + use C (and go insane :-)


Sarathy
gsar@activestate.com