Have fun! The memory effect showed up pretty clearly when I made the array big enough. BTW, what graphics drawing packages have you been having success with? I've got some requirements for things along those lines.

One of the reasons to "hold onto memory" once you get it is that the OS memory allocator is "expensive" in terms of CPU. Often when making a memory region allocated to you either bigger or smaller, the OS will get another contiguous hunk of the right "new size" and then copy all the old stuff into the new area! All this copying around can get really expensive! Perl has to do extra work to keep track of memory management, but at the end of the day this works out to be very much more performance efficient. I've run some tests in C with gcc on my WinXP platform to just to experiment with this although I don't think it appropriate to post C code here. But Perl is written in C and will be making all the same malloc(),calloc(),realloc() type memory calls.