> I don't know how performance bound you are, but both programs work ok > when you used forks.pm (using an unchanged program, by specifying > "-Mforks -Mforks::shared" on the command line). So this might be a > temporary alternative that would allow you to keep your source > unchanged and not have to worry about having to restart because it is > eating memory. performance is important but i'm running on some pretty big boxes. i'm about to launch a very large threaded application in a week and half or so, and am hesitant to make a change that large no matter how compatible they are. also, forks::shared doesn't support the :shared attribute, right? that's a lot of (minor) code changes. i was banking on the claim that 5.8.1 would solve the memory leaks with shared vars. a bit idealistic i'm sure, but at least the memory problem is somewhat manageable now. i should be able to run for about a day before restarting, though the ideal case would obviously be to never be *forced* to restart. jack