Before I start my ob XML::Twig pitch... ;--)

There are a couple of modules on CPAN that are specifically designed to process record-oriented XML:

• XML::RAX, RAX is described in RAX, an XML Database API. With XML::RAX you just go through your document, one record at a time:while ( $rec = $R->readRecord()) { print "Phone = ".$rec->getField('Phone')."\n"; }. Note that this works only if each record is "flat" (each element within the record is a single value)
• XML::SAX::Machines also has a record mode, which looks suspiciously like what XML::wig does... except it's SAX-based and integrates nicely with other SAX processing. I haven't tried this module (yet) but it looks interesting.

Finally XML::Twig was designed especially for this kind of problem. You can easily get rid of part of the document after you are done processing it: you can set a twig_handler for each ArgusFlowRecord, which will call a sub that has access to everything inside the element, then call purge or flush (if you need to output the updated element) and get your memory back./,/p>

See the tutorial, section 4.3 is what you are looking for (n ote that since I wrote the tutorial I added a field method that is equivalent to first_child->text but looks nicer.