Thanks - looks like an internal Perl issue... which is bad... I hope the Wise Ones know of a way to resolve this issue - else I will have to scrap the whole thing and re-write it in another language... Is that Blasphamy in here?
my thanks to all that have attempted to look at this issue.
Tom
I moved the compilation of the perl script perl_parse out of the loop and passed the pointer to the memory around in C - this cut the memory loss from 1072 down to 8 per message. Much more manageable!