Just something odd I noticed while reviewing the SGE job success emails for MIMEStatBot: When the script runs on a Solaris host, the "Max vmem" value is consistently between 20 and 25 M, but on Linux it jumps up to over 160 M.
Furthermore, the same effect can be reproduced with a much simpler test script. Compare:
vyznev@willow:~$ perl -e 'system "uname -a; ps -o comm,vsz -p $$"' SunOS willow 5.10 Generic_147441-19 i86pc i386 i86pc Solaris COMMAND VSZ perl 6632
vyznev@nightshade:~$ perl -e 'system "uname -a; ps -o comm,vsz -p $$"' Linux nightshade 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Sun May 6 04:00:17 UTC 2012 x86_64 GNU/Linux COMMAND VSZ perl 104364
What's going on here? It it just an accounting difference, or does a Perl process on Linux really consume over 100 megabytes more memory than on Solaris?