Your plan won't help you. TT concatenates all the output of a script to a single string before spitting it out. At least it does so until you tell it to do otherwise.

That hack might be useful, I'll definitely look into it. But won't avoiding populating those data structures in the first place potentially cut down on the size of the memory footprint at any given time? I'm still not certain that the returns will be worth the optimization, but it should be work something, shouldn't it?

Why do you use CGI::Prototype just to build a popup menu? Why not just use TT's loops and perhaps the DBI-Plugin?

Because we use CGI::Prototype for a whole lot more than loading popup menus :) otherwise your advice would be absolutely applicable. In fact, the generation of dropdowns is really view code, but it's complicated enough (lots of dropdowns loaded from the database) that a decision has been made to avoid doing too much of that type of heavy lifting in TT. It's not necessrily optimal, but that decision is mostly beyond my control.

perl -e 'split//,q{john hurl, pest caretaker}and(map{print @_[$_]}(joi
+n(q{},map{sprintf(qq{%010u},$_)}(2**2*307*4993,5*101*641*5261,7*59*79
+*36997,13*17*71*45131,3**2*67*89*167*181))=~/\d{2}/g));'
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