For a sound overview of how memory is released back to the OS see Elian's reply to make perl release memory - Re: make perl release memory. The gist of it being that memory isn't released back to the OS unless it's in nice big contiguous chunks.
HTH

_________
broquaint

In reply to Re: Freeing memory used by arrays by broquaint
in thread Freeing memory used by arrays by monktim

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