memory usage in mod_perl

[Jake]

<quote who="Max Kanat-Alexander">
> On Wed, 17 Jan 2007 21:48:27 +1100 "Bradley Baetz" <bbaetz at acm.org>
> wrote:
>> Perl does free up memory unless you end up with cycles; strictly
>> speaking its libc/the kernel that won't ever free it up.
>
> 	No, it's perl that doesn't return it to the kernel:
>
> 	http://perl.apache.org/docs/1.0/guide/performance.html#Memory_leakage

According to that link, Perl won't return it to the kernel, but it will
reuse it. So unless there's a ton of memory all being used at the exact
same time on a thread, it doesn't seem like even a long buglist should
cause memory usage to climb to 350MB. Even if 20 people loaded buglists
that happened to take up 10MB of RAM each (which seems like quite a bit to
me!), that should only be 200MB of total RAM. And that would require the
unfortunate luck of those 20 people all hitting the same mod_perl thread.
But as soon as their buglist is loaded, Perl should start reusing that
RAM.

Do attachments get cached in memory? Could those be what's causing memory
usage to spike?