NAME

Test::Memory::Usage - make sure code doesn't unexpectedly eat all your memory

VERSION

version 0.0.5

SYNOPSIS

The easiest usage pattern looks like this:

    use Test::Memory::Usage;

    # do some setup; decide that's roughly where you should be with usage
    # levels; draw your lin in the sand
    memory_usage_start;

    # do some things that you want to test as normal
    # ...
    
    # finally, make sure you haven't run away with memory
    memory_usage_ok;
    done_testing;

You can call memory_usage_start as often as you like; each call moves the reference point used for comparison with memory_usage_ok:

    # loop over some action and make sure it doesn't grow
    for (1 .. 5) {
        memory_usage_start;

        # bad growing code!
    
        memory_usage_ok(10);
    }

EXPORTS

Test::Memory::Usage exports the following subs automatically:

memory_usage_start

memory_usage_ok

memory_virtual_ok

memory_rss_ok

memory_stack_ok

METHODS

The module provides the following methods:

memory_usage_start

This method records the current memory usage and flags it to be used for any growth tests later in the script.

You can call the method multiple times; each call adds a new state record and updates makes the most recent state recorded the reference point for any growth comparisons

This is useful if you want to compare the usage after you've performed a certain amount of minimum setup before the area(s) of code that you want to verify memory usage for.

memory_usage_ok($percentage_limit)

This calls the memory_virtual_ok() and memory_rss_ok() functions.

If not provided $percentage_limit defaults to '10'.

memory_virtual_ok($percentage_limit)

Runs the test to ensure that virtual memory usage hasn't grown more than $percentage_limit

This isn't usually called explicitly as most users will find memory_usage_ok() meets their testing needs.

If not provided $percentage_limit defaults to '10'.

memory_rss_ok($percentage_limit)

Runs the test to ensure that RSS memory usage hasn't grown more than $percentage_limit

This isn't usually called explicitly as most users will find memory_usage_ok() meets their testing needs.

If not provided $percentage_limit defaults to '10'.

memory_stack_ok($percentage_limit)

Runs the test to ensure that data/stack memory usage hasn't grown more than $percentage_limit

This isn't usually called explicitly as most users will find memory_usage_ok() meets their testing needs.

If not provided $percentage_limit defaults to '10'.

SEE ALSO

Memory::Usage

AUTHOR'S NOTES

I still have some concerns over the benefit of this module for testing.

While it behaved fairly well locally, the test reports for failures from cpantesters.org demonstrated that either the approach is flawed in general, or that I'm just bad at writing portable tests.

The module was briefly removed from the CPAN because I doubted the usefulness of this module and didn't want to muddy the waters with a potentially frustrating test module.

It can sometimes be tricky to determine the right level of growth, if any, that you'll allow your process to have. Maybe my flaw was just that I set them all to be too strict.

After receiving a tweet recently I decided to re-upload this module, and allow people to make their own choice.

Any improvements to the module, or the test suite would be greatly appreciated. I wrote this module to attempt to prevent horrific memory leaks in some code I was maintaining, so this or something like this could be beneficial.

Chisel, May 2013

AUTHOR

Chisel <chisel@chizography.net>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

This software is copyright (c) 2011 by Chisel Wright.

This is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as the Perl 5 programming language system itself.