[Bioperl-l] memory leak in Bio::Species

[Dmitry Karasik]

Dear all,

I've hit a memory leak issue that OOMs our daemons once in a while, and what is
worse, I don't have the BioPerl expertise to fix it (I would send a patch
otherwise ). The problem is that Bio::Species and/or the modules it uses forms
cyclic references, which are never killed by perl automatically. I guess
either some internal data structure has to be reworked, or there should be some
strategic placing of Scalar::Util::weaken, but I have no idea where (or rather,
I could devise a hack that hammers weaken() instantly, but I don't think
this is the right approach).

It's very simple to reproduce, f.ex. by this:

	use Devel::Cycle;
	use Bio::Species;
	find_cycle(Bio::Species->new(-classification => ['A']));

which outputs

	Cycle (1):
           $Bio::Species::A->{'taxon'} => \%Bio::Taxon::B               
         $Bio::Taxon::B->{'_ancestor'} => \%Bio::Taxon::C               
             $Bio::Taxon::C->{'_desc'} => \%D                           
                             $D->{'1'} => \%Bio::Taxon::B               

	Cycle (2):
            $Bio::Species::A->{'tree'} => \%Bio::Tree::Tree::E          
        $Bio::Tree::Tree::E->{'_rootnode'} => \%Bio::Taxon::C               
             $Bio::Taxon::C->{'_desc'} => \%D                           
                             $D->{'1'} => \%Bio::Taxon::B               
         $Bio::Taxon::B->{'_ancestor'} => \%Bio::Taxon::C     

whereas I would expect it would print nothing.

I should really much like to ask the devs for a closer look. It's here on
github: https://github.com/bioperl/bioperl-live/issues/81

Thank you in advance!

-- 
Sincerely,
	Dmitry Karasik