[users@httpd] Memory leak or normal behavior

[Apostolos Pantsiopoulos <httpd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am running a source-built version of apache 2.0.55  with modperl 2 and 
php 5.0.5.
When one of my scripts use a lot of memory then I can see the httpd 
processes get quite large, which is quite normal.
But when my script finishes then this memory is not released from the 
httpd process (if it was cached by Linux I would understand it).
Is this a normal behavior? And if it is, will it not lead me to a 
fat-process-slow-response behaviour if I don't restart the service manually?

I've tried it using perl and php scripts. Especially the perl script was 
very simple. I just created an array filling it with garbage. Then at 
the end of the script I unset the array variable. Still the process that 
handled my request didn't free any memory after the end of the script. 
The same thing happens with php.

Shouldn't apache have a mechanism to free the memory it uses after a 
script execution.

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