How to reduce perl memory usage?

Question

I would like to use Perl on an embedded device, which only has 64MB of RAM.
Are there any tricks to reduce the memory usage of the perl interpreter?

Answer 1

You can try building the perl interpreter/run-time-library with support for some aspects of the core language compiled-out (like Unicode, threads, etc.). See the files in the core distribution such as "README" or "INSTALL". Otherwise, there are ways to reduce the memory consumption of a running perl process, especially those that avoid memory leaks such as those caused by circular references, preferring packed strings over arrays over hashes, and using specialized Perl/XS code for memory intensive code.

Answer 2

That 64 MB looks like room enough. Compile a perl without threads, debug. There is also a miniperl, that is used by the installer. But that is rather limited in options than in size.

Can still be interesting:
http://www.perlmonks.org/bare/?node_id=377735

Also check the malloc options.