cheers for that - I gave it a try and definitely could see the memory footprint growing, but once it had completed one cycle of the loop it didn't grow any further. Is that what I should expect to see with that script?

From what I gather - this makes sense. Like you say, if the OS kept having to allocate and reallocate memory it would slow things down a lot...

So far I've been playing around with GD::graph, in particular gd::graph::line. Sometimes its a bit limiting, but overall its done very well. I use it a lot for analysing some of my systems at work, primarily things like throughput and latency, etc.

Are you familar with .Net? Some of the guys at work have been getting into the .net charts - I'd love it if someone created an interface for perl for something like these. dotnet_graphs