I noticed that starting the benchmark allocates an enormous amount of memory. The reason seems to be Foreach{,2,3,4} benchmarks. Each of these has the line
array const_array = enumerate(10000000);
on the top level. This means that there is an object occupying 160M (10M * sizeof(svalue)) in each of these _programs_, so it is always present when the programs are loaded, not just when the benchmarks are run.
So in short, loading these four benchmarks (pike -x benchmark loads all the benchmarks) allocates 640M ram. That's a bit steep for my Raspberry Pi which only has 1G in total... (If I change the size of the arrays to 3M elements then the benchmarks complete normally.)
Could perhaps each of these arrays be allocated before the respective benchmark is run, and freed afterwards, instead of being allocated when the benchmark is loaded and freed never?