in reply to TCP Socket, Forking, Memory exhaustion
Are you sure that forking a script doubles your memory usage?
I thought that on most systems running a second copy of a program, perl in this case, would only increase overall memory usage by the size of the read-write data area only. As the readonly data and code memory would be shared by the processes. Ditto for all subsequent copies.
If you're using something like top or PS to assess the memory usage, it may be telling you porkies. Try starting one copy and then record the total free memory figure. Then start a second copy and record the total free memory figure again. The difference will be your actual per process consumption, which in many cases will be far less that the figure suggested by ps/top.