So between your response; and the other response; I have gotten a huge amount of improvement; but I still get the hang / crash eventually. I actually think the main thing helping; is using the single tag for all the entries, and not keeping track of them. That uses way way less memory. I suspect the difference in using $canvas vs $mw for the idle tasks; may not matter in the end; as doing it either way clearly helps. My real script now runs almost at an acceptable level at least. I am about to go on vacation for about a week, but when I get back I'm planning on retrying this on active state perl to see if i see the same thing or not. Thanks.